8/12 – 2:15 AM Report

I didn’t want to stop working on migrating the CCC website from Bluehost to DigitalOcean halfway, so I stayed up and completed the work around 1:15 am. I then used the CES and attempted to fall asleep – I’d finally enter dreamland around 2:15 am.

8/12 – 11:00 PM Report

It was a productive day. I fixed some bugs with the CCC website transfer, read (big surprise? :)), had lunch with Mr. John Broglin, setup a new litter box Andrew and Laura Vogel gave us, took a short nap, spent several hours working on various Nomads tasks, then off at 6:30 for the leader’s meeting, games from 7-8, then lesson from 8-9. Had some good discussion centering around MacDonald’s Lost Princess Chapter 6, which I think parallels (in many ways) Romans 1-2.

Home by 9:30 I was still doing pretty good (emotionally). I made an update to this site, read some more, used the CES, and hit the sack around 11 pm. Yup, another early night for me…I was beat.

Conclusion

This was my third (in a row) productive day where I felt satisfied with the day. I began keeping a concise daily journal on 7/1 in which I enter how I spent my time in blocks – these blocks can be as small as 15 minutes or as large as 5 or 8 hours. Being able to look back and see how I spent my time at the end of the day really helps me feel better about what I have accomplished (I tend to be very hard on myself, always pushing for more productivity) – it is also how I can write what I do in these posts – I refer to the daily journal and it tells me. 🙂

It isn’t a verbose daily journal. It tends to look like this:

• 3:45-4:30 pm – .75 – Transferring CCC site to DigitalOcean.
• 4:30-6:30 pm – 2 – Preparations for Nomads.
• 6:30-9:30 pm – 3 – Nomads.
• 9:30-10:00 pm – .5 – OCD Dave update.
• 10:00-11:00 pm – 1 – Reading (name of book).
• 11:00-12:00 pm – 1 – CES, sleep.

Don Cheyney (Cairn University) made us keep a journal like this for a few weeks as pastoral students. We had to record every fifteen minutes what we were doing. This is a lot more flexible…

But it encourages me to “stay on task” and also to take appropriate breaks. For example, sometimes I’ll be hard on myself and take barely any time off from working from morning till night – with the daily journal I can tell how much “recreational” time I have taken and decide intelligently if I want to take more.

I also can be a serial-TV watcher (e.g. I might watch 1,2,3, etc. episodes of a TV show at one sitting…while this isn’t bad, it usually isn’t what I want to do, even if I watch the same number of episodes – I’d rather they be spread throughout the day to give my brain a rest…), but since I record everything in the journal and I don’t like seeing multiple hours consumed unproductively, I have a tendency to watch less or at least spread it out more…

That is all.