Free time partitionning

Author: Solène

Date: 06 January 2021

Tags: life

Comment on Mastodon

Lately I wanted to change the way I use my free time. I define my free time as: not working, not sleeping, not eating. So, I estimate it to six hours a day in work day and fourteen hours in non worked day.

With the year 2020 being quite unusual, I was staying at home most of the time without seeing the time passing. At the end of the year, I started to mix the duration of weeks and months which disturbed me a lot.

For a a few weeks now, I started to change the way I spend my free time. I thought it was be nice to have a few separate activies in the same day to help me realizing how time is passing by.

Activity list

Here is the way I chose to distribute my free time. It's not a strict approach, I measure nothing. But I try to keep a simple ratio of 3/6, 2/6 and 1/6.

Recreation: 3/6

I spend a lot of time in recreation time. A few activies I've put into recreation:

video games

movies

reading novels

sports

Creativity: 2/6

Those activies requires creativy, work and knowledge:

writing code

reading technical books

playing music

creating content (texts, video, audio etc..)

Chores: 1/6

Yes, obviously this has to be done on free time... And it's always better to do it a bit everyday than accumulating it until you are forced to proceed.

Conclusion

I only started for a few weeks now but I really enjoy doing it. As I said previously, it's not something I stricly apply, but more a general way to spend my time and not stick for six hours writing code in a row from after work to going to sleep. I really feel my life is better balanced now and I feel some accomplishments for the few activies done every day.

Questions / Answers

> Some asked asked me if I was planning in advance how I spend my time.

The answer is no. I don't plan anything but when I tend to lose focus on what I'm doing (and this happen often), I think about this time repartition method and then I think it may be time to jump on another activity and I pick something in another category. Now I think about it, that was very often that I was doing something because I was bored and lacking idea of activities to occupy myself, with this current list I no longer have this issue.