A Mighty List of Accomplishments

Schedule Deep Dive

In a way, my post today builds upon what I wrote about last week.

Keeping in mind I've been working for over a week straight (weird work week on my partner's end, which means weird work week for me, too) and that I'm still in the midst of trialing this new schedule layout and divvying up my work differently than before, the new digital-physical planning may be exceeding expectations.

I thrive with templates. Much of my creativity fires at max capacity when I look at preexisting material and ask myself, "How can I make this better?" I had already done some finagling with the Excel template I previewed last week, but I've since modified it further for ease of reading. For comparison's sake, this is the original file I downloaded for free using the search bar within Excel itself:

Originally, it was designed for students. I would say college or university students, but the inability to block off a full hour and a half for Tues/Thurs classes severely limits the utility of this schedule. I tsked at that time blocking, knowing it needed to change, which led to the modifications I made and shared last week:

Keeping time slots on the left of the schedule makes it easier to block out any amount of time via half-hour increments, and having a larger list of to-dos gets all of the "assignments" down to then be sorted by "due date" in the "daily tasks" portion. I'm no longer in school, so I find the highest priority items and plop 3-5 of them into the following day. Yet, aside from some color here and there to differentiate my partner's usual off days, the current day, etc...the document itself still feels like a jumbled mess of text and tables. Functional? Yes, but I wanted to see if I could make it even easier to read and follow...

...so I made some minor tweaks that vastly improve the readability. The green days under the "DAILY TASKS" are days off of work, the light-opacity red highlight denoting the current day. The color coding for the "Larger List of To-Dos" tells me from red → orange → yellow → green → blue the importance of the task, red denoting the highest priority and blue almost a casual, "Do this as a hobby when you can." I own Pastwatch, so I can read it at any time. Red Rising is green because I'm borrowing it on the Libby app, and therefore I have a time limit by which to finish it, making it slightly more time intensive than Pastwatch.

I created a table for a "Nightly Routine" to reinforce the steps I want to take at night to wind down and make time for reading in bed. Below that, I created another table for "Future Projects/Skills I Want to Develop," which includes some of the categories I listed at the beginning of my physical planner. That way, as I complete certain objectives, such as finishing Dorico lessons, I can replace them with other interests or practical skills. I can move from learning how to work my way around the Dorico software to reacquainting myself with harmonic movement and voice leading techniques, practicing my Dorico knowledge while improving my music composition skills, for example.

I should mention, since the above is only a snapshot of the document, I have 3 variations of the leftmost weekly schedule. The first as indicated shows days off being Monday and Saturday. The one below that depicts Sundays and Thursdays as days off, and then the last one is for odd weeks like this past one. I may be able to condense them all into a single weekly schedule if I continue planning each day during the evening of the previous. It's easy enough to tinker with while my partner is taking his turn on Hades or getting ready for bed, but alternating the color coding for our days off could prove more tedious a task than the time I'm willing to commit.

This digital rendition of my plan reflects an ideal day, but we all know that not every day is ideal, which is why the physical planner exists to (mostly) measure the reality. The digital allows me to set my expectations high; the physical laughs at those expectations and tells me to temper them.

Monday, it started raining on me in the middle of my walk, and today though I sat to write at 8:00, gathering my focus took nearly a full hour. After lunch while my partner napped, I went on a short walk with Qiri instead of either working out or continuing to write and didn't return to the blog until almost 13:00. (I had to check the deals in my Costco pamphlet!)

Yet aside from today, which was almost a day off since my partner worked a half day, the new schedule and work routine has been serving me well and doesn't take long to revise. I have the structure I want for the day without the rigidity of needing to follow it to a T. Unexpected interruption? No problem, I'll just write it in my physical planner later.

Will this be a permanent structure for me? I'm not sure, but after the repetitive nature of filling out the physical planner and no longer really feeling like I was accomplishing anything, it's a breath of fresh air.

Other Notable Accomplishments:

• Wrote 20th Nudon Journal: 752 words

• Transcribed Session 110 Part 5

• Reviewed Dorico Lessons 1 & 2 on Skillshare & copied down keyboard shortcuts for quick reference

• Worked a little more on Teyr'loch Delter Pach

• Transcribed Session 111: 20,300 words / ~3.7 hours

  • I've only been transcribing 1-2 files per day because of my wrist; it's actually been nice not devoting an entire day to transcribing an entire session just to get it out of the way

• Watched the "Music Fundamentals" video series on Skillshare as a reintroductory course for composing music, just to start getting back into the mindset of being a composer

• Built With Science Intermediate workouts C & A

• Read chapter 3 of my Belkin Musical Composition book

• Wrote 21st Nudon Journal: 1,241 words

• Wrote Correspondence for the 21st Nudon: 993 words

• Dorico Lesson 3 on Skillshare

• Transcribed Session 112 Part 1: 6,480 words / ~62 minutes long

Questions for Contemplation & Discussion:

• Do you prefer to rework templates to fit your own needs, or do you enjoy creating templates from scratch? I myself have always performed better when given a framework within which to create, whether that be following specific rules (write a piano piece using sonata form) or premade templates like the one above.

  • If you're the latter and prefer to create everything from scratch, what is your process for doing so? Do you record the evolution of your creation from start to finish so you can see where major developments happened, or does it just evolve organically over time into what you would consider the finished product?

This Week's Obligatory Cat Pic: Mura