2018-05-22

Scheduled the day again. Realised I can break it into 4 blocks:

• 7am - 9am: Shallow work (active 1 hour)
• 9am - 3pm: Deep work (active 4 hours)
• 3pm - 9pm: Shallow work (active 2 hours)
• 9pm - 11pm: Deep work (active 2 hours)

By shallow work, I mean things that would take me a few weeks to train somebody else to do. By deep work, I mean things that require intense concentration, and which leverage the domain knowledge and engineering skills that I’ve built up over the last three decades. By active, I mean sitting at my desk doing real work, and not just pretending to be busy. In breaks I can still passively work, by answering emails and things like that, but I may be doing that on my phone while I’m distracted with something else.

This makes sense to me. It’s hard to do more than six hours of active, deep work in a single day. It can be mentally exhausting. Most “knowledge workers” in a traditional open-plan office would struggle to achieve half of that. But that’s where the value is.

I like that rough schedule. It gives me time to work my main job, and time to make progress on hobby projects.

Speaking of which, didn’t work on HackTile at all today, even though I’d planned to. Got delayed reading The Queen of Sorcery to Eliza and cleaning up the kitchen, then listened to two episodes of The West Wing Weekly. It was too late after all that to begin working on something.

Kids had their flu shot today. Picked up Eliza from string orchestra practice early. Jack being very silly (annoyingly so) all afternoon. He’s developed a habit of lying for fun. Must change that. Dzung made pork ribs for dinner. I’m doing OK; still 75% health after recovering from this cold.