Dividing time

Have you ever noticed how we divide time tends to shape our perspective on how those newly divided subsections of time can be used?

Technology tends to shrink our view of time. The BlackBerry introduced us to 15-minute intervals. It's instant delivery of email sometimes even made the space between time segments even less. Twitter has made everything instantaneous. I prefer to consider time in terms of days, but even there, how many parts are there to a day?

For a while I broke a day up into 4 parts:

• D0 — midnight to 6am — ~ sleep time
• D1 — 6am to noon
• D2 — noon to 6pm
• D3 — 6pm to midnight

This was useful for mentally separating large parts of the day, recording highlights, etc.

This is not useful if one wants to designate some parts of a day for maintaining and advancing.

I've shifted to looking at 10 different 1.5-hour segments in the waking part of a day. These roughly coincide with the amount of daylight in the Washington area during the summer. (And yes, this offsets for DST.) The other 6 segments are for sleeping (5 for unconsciousness, 1 for wind-down).

The first three and last three segments of each day are for maintaining.
• In the morning, everything to get the day in: shower, Word reading, breakfast; Word hiding, commute, email; daily updates, breakfast part 2, etc.
• In the evening: exercise; dinner, Word review, piano; reading, and the day is out.

That leaves four segments in the middle for deep work.

What I find interesting about this day plan is that 60% is for maintaining and 40% is for advancing. Of course, other things get in the way, but at least this gives me a goal and somewhere to put those other things on the plan.

Dividing my day up according to how I view the purposes for my time has been helpful in getting my focus on advancing the things I want to advance.