Yesterday I spent an hour designing my weekly schedule. Here is a quick Bar Chart using Plotly.

I am using Toggl to track it.

Failing fast provides us more number of iterations. So, setting resolutions for a week rather than for a year seems to be a good idea. A week has only 168 hours. It's easier than keeping track of 365 days X 24 hours = 8760 hours.

  1. Sleep - 8 hours x 7 days = 56 hours:

    Data clearly shows one task that is taking the most number of hours away from my weekly budget is the night sleep. But, having 8 hours of sleep a day is justifiable. I am aware of Arnold's 6 hour 'Sleep Fast' recommendation. If I could to do that, it's a great optimization. I will save 2 hours each day. Getting 14 hours bonus every week is a big deal. You can accomplish a lot in those 14 hours. But, then I have never been able to do with less than 8.

  2. Active Income - 5 hours x 7 days = 35 hours:

    Earning your living is the next most important task on the list. Money opens the door to lot of possibilities. From learning new skills, buying new experiences to taking a vacation. For some, this is a regular 9 to 5 day job. I am lucky enough to have the power to set it to whatever form-factor I like. I typically like to spread my work hours across 7 days rather than cramming everything within 5 days. So, if I have to work for 40 hours, I will work 6 hours a day for 7 days making it 42 hours for a week rather than 8 hours for 5 days making a 40. This is more productive than working for long hours each day. I have found that most of time I simply waste/not-produtive for about 3 hours when I am doing 8 a day. This is the type of work where I am having active income. If my hourly charge is $200/hour , I can only make so much. The day has a limit to it. 24 hours. And I have a limit to taxing my brain cycles. I can't work for more than 5 hours. Active income can't scale. But, making $200 in exchange for an hour of skilled work is much easier than making $200 from customers paying for a new product idea that popped up in your mind.

  3. Body Maintenance - 3 hours x 7 days = 21 hours:

    This is just the usual chores. Brush your teeth. Take a bath. I have set aside 1 hour each day for Morning Yoga and Evening Walk. I do a set of Pranayams. Pranayams work for me. I do everything else within the other 2 hours. That includes breakfast, lunch, dinner, taking bath, everything you know.

  4. Passive income - 10 hours:

    I already talked about the problem with Active income. I work on some project ideas, like a software-as-a-service or anything else, where there is a scope of scaling out the sale irrespective of the time you have put into building the stuff. This is a whole different world. Here you can have a product priced at $1 which took you a week to build, but if you are able to sell it to a million customers. You are a millionaire. Obviosuly, it's not that easy. Getting customers to buy your stuff is the hard part. Good thing is you keep minting money even in your sleep. Your sales are all happening online in different timezones. I generally work on these projects straight off in a single session. Like a 10 hour hackathon.

  5. Specializations - 10 hours:

    Building a product or getting paid for your skills, whatever it is, having a specialization always helps. For example, you can be better armed if you have completed a 12 week deep dive program in Spark. Having a superficial knowledge you skimmed off from some online blog never helps. I have found in myself a fast learner. I know my strength. It doesn't takes me more than 20-30 hours to finish a 12 week course. That's about two-three sessions. Again, like the projects, I typically work on these straight off in a single session instead of spreading it across the week. Which means, I will spend 10 hours studying instead of doing a 1.5 hours session 7 days a week. Spreading across breaks the flow and has high cost of context switching in my case.

  6. Computer Science & Engineering - 10 hours:

    I have set aside 10 hours for visting back the fundamentals. Again, straight sessions. I typically study a topic, some set of video lectures from one of the finest universities. These days with MOOCs, you just need to have the willingness to learn. You have no dearth of world class materials. I have found Princeton, MIT, Columbia and Michigan to be awesome. Stanford, Berkley, SanDiago, UTx are also good.

  7. Music Production - 5 hours:

    I have kept this very flexible. Sometimes an hour a day .. sometimes few hours. It depends upon how inspired I am from an idea and how are my other task schedules/ backlogs going on. This is on a lower priority to the above tasks. Mostly learning from Berklee School of Music, Boston and Shankar Mahadevan Academy.

  8. New domain - 5 hours:

    I have this unquenchable appetitie for interdisciplinary work. This has landed me into some very interesting projects. One great example is a project where I built a diet recommendation system for cancer patients.

  9. Business studies - 5 hours:

    I keep studying these just to prepare myself well for the time when I will launch my startup.

  10. College level - 5 hours:

    I take out time to read textbooks by people like Richard Feynman, some college level microbiology or just to refresh my linear algebra skills. An Eigen vector can be worth a million dollars, Google has proved it. Khan Academy is a great source and some very interesting MOOCs again.

  11. Unplanned - 6 hours:

    Most of the time, I spend this part just day dreaming or reading some article on the Internet. Watching a TED talk. Hanging out with friends. Or writing down an idea or a blog post.

  12. Process improvement- 1 hour:

    Revisit every week on my W3s(What went wrong) and W2Rs(What went right) analysis for the past week. And try to improve things.