Night before, went to sleep at 10PM. Slept until around 2AM. Was too hot to sleep, so moved downstairs to basement. Couch uncomfortable, didnt fall asleep until 4 or 5AM (estimate) when was exhausted.

thought: comfort plays a big part in sleeping well.

Awoke at 12:30PM. Ate leftover curry. Checked email. Surfed. According to browser history:

• 1245: Read email. Moderated comment on “Percentile Feedback” (A link to “Seth’s Blog”). Added Seth, Matthew Cornell’s blogs to a new blogosphere list on WorkPage. (15min)
• 1300: Facebook: looked into Emergency Alert System from friend’s link. (15min)
• 1315: Facebook: read news, comi-con coverage, bombing in Oslo. BoingBoing: ThinkQuarterly from Google (stumble added) (15min)
• 1400: Email: Track down reason for return of ETP pad 3 weeks after it sold, which Amazon automatically pays despite reason. Some guy in NYC. Tried to determine if this loss is eaten by me or Amazon. (15min)
• 1415: Update Google Wave with comparison of Amazon shipping costs (15 min)
• 1430: Email: look at sales for digital downloads
• 1430: reorder pads from PaperGraphics
• 1445: Make new background for davidseah.com, reject, and just make it darker (30min)
• 1515: Facebook: check photo studio pics, cousin posts, Shipwire (15min)
• 1530: As for ShipWire, calculating how much it costs versus Amazon (15 min)
• 1545: Started this post, using browser history, reconstrucing day (30 min)

So that’s where the past 2.5 hours went. Some work done: blog comments, research into other bloggers, blog tweaks, looking at ETP pad status, and confirming that it would be cheaper to go with Shipwire. I also did a pile of laundry and cleaned up the bathroom, which isn’t captured by browser history. That’s not so bad. 45 minutes of Facebook surfing, though, leading to multiple rabbit holes that are interesting, but don’t move me forward. Reacting to email, though, is at least somewhat focused.

One thing I’m noting is that I can actually get a chunk of stuff done in 15 minutes. In 30 minutes I can make one thing and try it out. There also seems to be about a 1:1 work-to-play ratio in effect.

Which leaves me with the rest of the day until 10PM tonight, when I again go to sleep. It’s around 4:30PM. That gives me about 5 hours.

On my mind:

• Client work…how much time to spend on it today?
• Dave Future Revenue Generation…should spend 15 minutes on it.
• Dave Programming Efforts…should spend some time on this, but it feels backburnered.

I find myself wishing that I could focus only on one thing and not worry about everything else. The solution that popped into my head was to start implementing an “agile” approach to my own productivity. People have commented on how my forms seem to be philosophically aligned with SCRUM. I am in the mood for a two-week sprint, but devoting no more than 2 hours a day to it. 4 hours a day can be devoted to client work. A third 15 minute a day slot would be available for lighter projects.

Ok, off to Starbucks to diagram this out. It’s currently 4:45PM. I just also modified the CleanrAgenceum theme to fix some overzelous cleaning of the blog description of tags.

UPDATE

At Starbucks, I spent about 15 minutes drawing an ideal diagram of my time use, then from 5:15 to 9:30 made a graphic in the style of a microcomputer / high-end audio component, complete with a logo for “Seah Micro”. Fairly productive, if not quite planned.

ASLEEP at 11PM. But woke up again at 100AM. Tossed and turned. Adjusted AC to be two degrees cooler (78) so the upstairs wasn’t too warm. Around 230AM I gave up and went downstairs and spent about 30 minutes gathering information about database manipulation into a WordPress plugin skeleton I started, in anticipation of doing some webservice coding.

It’s going to be a hard day tomorrow waking up.