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Hello again!

It's Monday! The beginning of a new week! Hope you're doing well and that you had a great weekend!

In the week that passed I did my best to finish a book that I started reading more or less that the beginning of last week. I even mentioned the book several times in last week's articles, it's name being "7 habits of highly effective people", written by R. Stephen Covey.

Now, there are a lot of things in the book that I could talk about, and some I'd rather not go into, one of the reasons being that I do not completely understand them.

However, one of those things that I'd like to mention was the idea of changing the way we schedule our work days. In my case, my own personal days.

For the past few months I've been unemployed and while I do technically have a job, that is currently, temporarily, unavailable (due to Covid-19 restrictions and places being closed), I don't really leave the house and I don't have a stable income. Therefore, until I can actually go to said job, I have to freelance and make some money from home.

Compared to the first time I freelanced however, back when I was 18-20 years old, my schedule has been quite chaotic, and I have had a really hard time keeping myself productive and interested in doing any serious work.

I spent a lot of time playing games (which, to my defense, I felt was quite needed to burn some steam, after going, for two years, to a job I really hated), watching YouTube videos, and reading (the only productive activity I've done most of my time). And while I worked on a few projects here and there, I have not been consistent at all.

While I was reading the book I mentioned at the beginning of the article, I got an idea for an experiment I wanted to conduct on myself, involving visualization and small changes in my environment that were supposed to help me get motivated to do more.

Sadly, that experiment wasn't successful in the way that I wanted it to be, but it did show me one thing that was really important to me, which was that consistency is extremely important. It's what kept me motivated to write and publish, not visualization.

After the experiment was over I kept reading until, on Saturday, I stumbled upon a section within that book that talked about scheduling and how to organize our time in order to be more productive. I won't bore you with all the details, but the short version of it is this: instead of planning your days with to-do lists, try to plan your entire week.

This is supposed to do a few things. First, it will give you a rough idea of what you'll be able to achieve in 7 days (or 5, if you don't count weekends). If you actually know what you want to achieve in a week, then you'll be able to plan it really well, at the beginning of the week, and then not worry about anything other than following your schedule every single day. It will provide you with a clear image of what you need to do, and it will take the pressure of coming up with a to-do list on a daily basis.

The author even gave society as an example. If you look at pretty much everything out there, schools, hospitals, banks, or any other job (maybe with a few exceptions), most of them work on a weekly-based schedule. You start work on Monday, and you finish it on Friday (or later).

No job out there (or very few jobs) works based on to-do lists that your boss makes a day before the actual working day. Everything is planned a week before, at least as far as you know. I'm sure that those who are in charge have monthly or yearly plans, but that's something different.

The idea is that planning your entire week ahead and knowing exactly what are the tasks that you need to focus on in order to accomplish the things that you want could actually help you be more productive.

Looking back at it, it might've been another thing that kept me going with the experiment I did. I knew what I had to do before the week even started, so I didn't really have to plan anything daily. I just knew I had to write and also do some extra tasks, like trading on the Hive marketplace.

Anyway, I'm at least willing to try and see for myself. I have planned this entire week yesterday and I have a pretty clear idea of what I'd like to accomplish every day. There are a few things that I need to get used to again, like waking up and going to sleep at normal hours, and forcing myself to stay focused on tasks for longer than a few minutes, but I'll get there.

Thing is, it might work, and it might provide me (and other people who might be willing to try) with a new and solid method of being productive. If it does, then great. If it doesn't, well, at least I tried. I'll write another post, with an update on this topic, at the end of the week, to let you know if this weekly-based schedule worked any better than my normal to-do lists.