Things didn’t go well in March. Previously all my habits and systems were built off of my standard schedule of buses, libraries, and my work office. With COVID-19 I lost all these anchor points and have had a hard time achieving my goals.

My focus for this month is thus to get everything back on track and to make my systems more resilient to this kind of volatility.

Goal 1: Delineated Daily Schedule

My physical environment plays a major role in my habits, energy levels, and motivation. The best way I’ve found to get myself to spend particular chunks of time doing particular activities is to make sure I am in a physical location that I associate as being reserved for that activity. For instance, I did my morning work block on the bus into work, then my work day in the office, then productive meandering on the bus home. On weekends I would often go to the library to get work done. Home was reserved for rest and relaxation.

Unfortunately, nowadays everything is home. There are no buses or libraries or offices. Productive time, work time, and rest time all need to happen at the same place, and I’m really not good at that. So my first goal for the month is to craft clear boundaries between different types of time, and try to get into the habit of better associating the time with the task. There are two components of this: physical location and environmental transitions.

First, I want to make sure I have separate physical locations that I keep reserved for each type of activity. To this end I’ve set up a work-from-home office in my room, and bought a room divider to section it off from the rest of my room (which is reserved for fun/relaxation time). When I need to do personal work, I have another room where I can work at a table on my laptop. Thus I now have a proxy for the “bus” and “office” I used to anchor my previous habits.

Second, I want to have a routine for transitioning between schedule chunks and the associated physical location, which I hypothesize will help establish the boundaries and will get me mentally prepared for the next activity. These are “at-home” equivalents of things like walking to and from the bus.

The first “transition” happens as soon as I wake up, first thing in the morning. I will go outside, listen to a particular “morning” song, and spend 5 minutes stretching, shaking out, warming-up, and generally moving. I’ll refer to this as the “upward transition”. It’s important that this happens first thing in the morning, because in the lack of external pressure I often fall into the failure mode of laying in bed on my phone and procrastinating on getting started with the day, which doesn’t get it off to a good start. After this I’m in “productivity mode” until I do another transition.

In “productivity mode” I spend an hour doing personal work, then 8 hours of professional work, and then an hour of productive meandering. Importantly, during this time I am not allowed to use the bed or couch, which are reserved for relaxation time. This is to get into the habit of treating this time as actual locked-into-work time as if I was in the office, and avoid another common failure mode around constantly tempting myself into taking long breaks. In general I should treat this time as if I’m in the office, and avoid doing things I wouldn’t be comfortable doing there.

To transition from “productivity mode” to “no-obligation personal mode” I will go outside, exercise for at least 15 minutes, and shower (which I will refer to as the “downward transition”). Usually I expect the exercise to be a run, but anything active is sufficient. In addition to providing a transition trigger, this also gives me a mental break and feeds into my fitness goals. During the exercise I can listen to podcasts, or just do some processing of what happened over the day. After the downward transition I can now access “relaxing” locations like the bed and couch, and should avoid work locations where possible.

So far I’ve been talking specifically about weekdays, but on weekends I want to do the same transitions. The key difference is how much productive time I have between the two transitions. So on weekend days where I do my weekend work block, that will be the only thing in between the transitions. On the other weekend day where I have a full day of rest, I will just do the downward transition immediately after the upward transition, and spend the rest of the day in relaxation mode.

As an aside, I will just note that the specifics here can be flexible as the situation demands. For instance, if it’s raining and I don’t want to do the transitions outside, I can do analogous activities inside.

Given that I fell off the wagon in March, the success of the overall monthly-goals project depends on doing this month’s goals well. To promote adherence, I’ve done some visualizations and transition practice runs at the end of March, and have written out an April calendar in a visible location, with each day separated into 4 quarters. The first quarter represents whether I successfully did an upward transition first thing in the morning. The fourth quarter represents whether I did my downward transition before doing any activities that shouldn’t be allowed in productive mode. (The other two quarters are discussed in the following goal).

Every day I will check off the appropriate sections of the calendar to track my progress. If I can get 100% adherence of quarters 1 and 4 up to and through Sunday, April 12th, then I will spend some money and throw a fun even with some friends as a reward.

I am fairly confident (95%) that I’ll stick to upward transitions on weekdays, after a couple trial runs and realizing how much I enjoy it (turns out that basking in the outdoors for a few minutes with some good music and pleasant stretching is fun, who knew?) This seems high, but is actually now confident I feel. I’m less confident (80%) on weekends, mostly due to the temptation to laze in bed in the morning, which is what I usually do. The only reason the prediction is this high is because 5 minutes is a small investment, I’m tracking things with a reward incentive, and I sent these goals out to my challenge network beforehand.

The downward transition is where I expect more difficulty (85% on weekdays and 80% on weekends, assuming I do the upward transition). On weekdays I’m concerned that I’ll just feel tired and unmotivated at the end of the day, and I haven’t yet established habits of exercising on non-running days. On weekends I’m just worried it will feel too annoying for rest days. I will try to remain vigilant the first couple weekends, with phone reminders set, and afterwards I don’t expect too much trouble.

Goal 2: Re-Establish Habits

The habits I’ve built up from January to mid-March include:

  • An hour of productive time before work on weekday mornings
  • 45 minutes of “productive meandering” each weekday after work
  • One 2.5-hour productivity block each weekend
  • Usage of a backlog/task-prioritization system
  • Slowly building up running mileage

In the latter half of march I was able to re-establish my morning productivity, running, and prioritization habits. That leaves post-work “meandering” and weekend productivity blocks as habits which I haven’t yet re-established.

The meandering goal is simple: after work and before the downward transition I’ll take a quick break, go to my personal productivity spot, and spend an hour doing whatever productive activity captures my fancy in the moment. This is a fairly low-intensity time, so it shouldn’t be too aversive.

As for the weekend work blocks, one problem I’ve noticed is that it isn’t clear what kinds of activities should “count” towards them. Does it matter if I would do the task by default anyways? Does doing taxes count as focused time? Does laundry? Attending EA Global? These “default” activities don’t help establish new habits as I was going to do them anyways, but they still cost time and energy which makes it difficult to do them in addition to other focused work. I’m going to attempt to draw an admittedly-fuzzy boundary where regular “maintenance” tasks like laundry don’t count, but one-off tasks like doing taxes do count. This means that a number of weekends will have the 2.5-hour commitment met by default, which is fine. In the lack of such externally-scheduled tasks, I will spend at least 2.5 hours on one day per weekend doing focused work in between the upward and downward transitions. As usual, if I am completely busy on the weekends for whatever reason and can’t do this block, then the goal will no longer apply.

Specifying the goal is simple, but actually sticking to it is another matter. I’m going to be using the same tracking and adherence system from the above goal, with the calendar divided into quarters. The second quarter represents whether I did my morning productivity time and professional work time. These are combined into a single entry since I was already doing them consistently at the end of March, so they seem low-risk. The third quarter represents whether I did productive meandering. If I am able to check both of these quarters off on every day up to and through Sunday April 12th, then I have another reward set up for myself. Note that this is independent from the similar system in Goal 1, but I expect them to be symbiotic.

I am confident (95%) that I will successfully stick to my morning work block, as I’ve already been successful in re-establishing it so far. I’m less confident (70%) that I will succeed with productive meandering each weekday. This seems kind of high given the historical data, but it also feels correct. This goes up to (80%) if I stick to my transitions properly. Finally, I predict (75%) that I’ll stick to weekend work blocks, mostly due to concerns that something will come up that I didn’t predict, and will throw me off. I’ll stick to my usual rule where if it’s obvious that I would have made an exception for a situation if I had the foresight to think of it in advance, then I can treat it as an exception when it comes up. If it’s not obvious I will be conservative and treat it as “not an exception”, to avoid the temptation to convince myself that everything should be an exception.

Goal 3: Catch Up on the Backlog

Right now I’m spending a lot of my productive time in a not-particularly-targeted manner, based on external inputs like email. Instead I’d like to focus on clearing out the highest priority items on my backlog/task-tracker. One notable example is blog posts, which I’m quite a bit behind on. I would like to clear off all the items from my highest-value bucket, as long as they take less than 3 hours to complete.

In the absence of unexpected high-priority work popping up, I predict (90%) that I can catch up on blog posts and (70%) that I can get down to at most 3 tasks in my highest-value bucket.

edit: you can find my retrospective for these goals here.