Time Management

I have a few goals for my trip beyond the typical see the world, have great experiences, etc.

I figure if I have a lot of time, I should invest some of it into improving things about my life that will hopefully carry over after I am done traveling. In no particular order, the main ones off the top of my head would be to eat healthy, exercise regularly and improve my productivity.

Each could use their own blog post, so I'll focus on the last one right now.

I'm not very productive. There was a brief period, earlier this year (Feb - Finals) where I did a good job. I had unc, thesis, finals, a gf, worked out regularly and I think I managed them all reasonably well. So I know I have it in me to get a lot done, while still . But already, I notice that I get less done, and am less ambitious towards doing what I need to.

On that note, I recently got recommended the book "The 4 Hour Work Week" by Tim Ferriss, and a lot of what he talks about is increasing productivity. He says a lot in his book, and I definitely do not agree with all of it (maybe I'll do a full summary when I complete it), but there were two things I thought were good and worth sharing.

1. Pareto's law. 80% of the results often take 20% of the effort ( On a side note, this explains my overall marks in engineering extremely well...). He uses the example that you can cut out the unneccessary stuff that is wasting 80% of your time, and significantly improve your life/ amount of free time. I think of this more in the opposite sense, in that if you really want to do something well, you're gonna need to work 5x as hard as the guy whose fine with just getting by.

2. Batching and Interruption. The idea that constant interruptions can stop you from getting things done, and to avoid them you should only check your email 2x a day (but not 1st thing in the morning because you're most productive then) and avoid reading the news on a regular basis. Batching is the idea that doing a bunch of tasks at once will save time and increase productivity versus spreading them out. (ie, checking emails every 5 minutes and responding to them when you get them versus only looking at 2 specific times per day)

So my goal for the next week (and beyond) is to check my emails very infrequently. Given I don't work a 9 to 5 there is no harm in checking my email first thing in the morning, but I'll try for noon and after dinner (~ 8 pm).

I also want to have a daily schedule (during the week). I'm going to work on this, but hopefully I can figure it out over this weekend and post it up here on Monday ( and spend 2 weeks working at it)