Scheduling Myself

Hello. Welcome to Daily(ish) for Friday, April 13. It is a balmy one degree outside. It feels like minus four. This is not a weather podcast, but thank you to the Patreon supporters, patreon.com/ichris, all the folks who support me on there, as well as you who just happen to listen.

And, I appreciate that there's people with eardrums who are out there listening to this podcast and any of the stuff really from goodstuff.fm. There's other shows, if you're not aware, that are far more regular than this daily ish podcast. As much as I've been on a scheduling tear as it were this week with two episodes, three maybe. In particular, of notes, way too seriously podcast, my brother-in-law and sister-in-law, I think that's how you say that. They're both in laws, produce, where they talk about movies, children's movies, and take them a little seriously and analyze them from many different angles beyond just whether it was a funny funny movie and, of I guess, of note.

So you can check out our good stuff .fm/wts. And, this the most recent episode, couple episodes anyways, were a couple of Harry Harry Potter movies. If you're into Harry Potter, you'll appreciate them. They love Harry Potters, all of them. And, the most recent one just published today was a Wrinkle in Time movie that is out, based on the book.

And so, yeah, a whole bunch of movies, a whole bunch of, goods good stuff on there. As well, speaking of, Jan and Paul who do way too seriously, their other show, Clockworks is starting up again now that Legion, TV show on the FX network, I think it is. I could have that wrong. Anyways, it's a show Marvel based show, TV series called Legion, and they have a podcast called Clockworks. Good stuff that I found slash Clockworks is where you can check that out.

And also while I was gone, the, the boys over at the Good Stuff Morning Show, which is funny in its own right and and interesting, they launched a sort of side podcast called today's special where they just they're 23 episodes in already talking about different foods each episode. So I forgot if they're posting every day, not quite. Doesn't yeah. Almost every day, basically. So if you like food and wanna hear more about different food and interesting things you can do with food, check out today's special, goodstuff.fm/ today's special.

And, all those links will be in the show notes, which you can find at goodstuff.fm/dailyish/240two. Man, that's a big number. So in speaking of Daily(ish), I have referenced this schedule that I had started. I sort of wrote up before the Mexico break. And when I left for we left for Mexico, I was kinda worried that I'd put all this effort into sort of setting up a schedule and then obviously Mexico was gonna throw that all off.

Coming home, would I find myself, you know, completely in a different headspace and not really wanting to follow this schedule anymore or would it work out? And coming home, actually, it was refreshing how, having something set in stone for me to do. There's obviously a a day and a half of, like, just ketchup stuff, but, don't go off on that Heraldine Discord. Ketchup is good. But stuff work's being done.

But in in spite of that, it kind of it's reminded me and it's been, yeah, it's been a good reminder for me that actually despite the fact that I feel like I just wanna be freewheeling and whatever I can wanna do, I'll work on. And the next thing that comes up, I'll just work on that, and then I'll work on something else, and someone will email me, and then I'll work on that, and some will text me, and then I'll go for a meeting or, you know, all that kind of stuff. I, I've really appreciated scheduling myself to death almost as at work because, ten years ago, me, something like that, whatever time frame, I would have bristled tremendously at the idea of having a scheduled workday. And not that I didn't work on stuff, like I would work on a whole thing, a project for a morning or day or three days in a row or whatever, but, having it written out in a scheduled form. I've tried variations on this in the past, but I don't know why for whatever reason now it's really sticking maybe because I'm, more mature and I should be saying schedule instead of schedule.

But it's it seems to be sticking better anyways. And the main area that works really well for me is I whether it's because I'm sitting in front of a computer or that's because I have a little bit of, like, easily distracted, brain that wants to run with any idea or any sort of inspiration I see or hear or feel and wanna just run with it in that moment. The schedule has sort of freed me up to shelve those things whether I put it into Todoist or I put it in a list in Trello or just write it down somewhere, and then come back to those things when it's I'm allowed to do it. So I don't have this fear of, like, I'm gonna miss out on redesigning my website, let's say, but I can leave that for when I have, lemon marketing work scheduled on my calendar on Wednesday or, working on a podcast prepping for the At You Too show and I have that scheduled 04:30 on Wednesdays. And so I can know that I'll do that even though I'm feeling antsy and anxious about maybe getting it ready on Tuesday or Wednesday morning.

Similarly with recording Daily(ish) where I've got it scheduled on first thing Monday morning, 11:00 on Wednesday and 02:00 on Friday, which right now it's quarter after two and I'm recording Daily(ish). In the past, would just kind of wait for inspiration to hit to record Daily(ish) which obviously, you know, is great when you're feeling inspired. But if you're feeling kinda sluggish and uninspired, then you're just not gonna record and that's not good for anybody. And even down to like I'd be in the past, I've had specific podcasts that need to be released on a certain day, clients that I edit their podcasts for, and I would know that on Thursday, let's say, Thursday or Friday, would edit Shop Talk Show, and then I would put that out to them, late Friday or whenever it was done. Whereas now I have a scheduled thing of Friday mornings, just first thing at a ShopTalk show.

Because I know it works for me first thing in the morning. I I can pound that out and get it done, and I don't dread going and working on it. And, I don't have to worry and think about it on Thursday when I'm supposed to doing web client work. All of sudden, I remember, oh, I should do ShopTalk show. I still send off like the odd message saying, you know, to the to the guys who host that saying, you know, are the files ready?

Is this does this look okay? But the the bulk of the work is done in that allotted time block. And even to the point like with my, Lambert and Productions YouTube channel that I wanna do is, having a time allotted on Monday to prep for a video and then time on Tuesday to record the video rather than just kinda like, I'm gonna do a video now and having to just, you know, work on it until it's done basically because that feels like it's a waste of time. If I don't finish it and putting aside other work, I can have an hour or so on Monday to prep for it and, an hour or so on Tuesday to actually edit and publish it. And right now on the on the schedule, there's a lot of just like blocks of time that are allotted for client work, web client work because that one I'm still trying to figure out exactly how and when to, schedule certain specific client tasks in and things like that, but it at least has a time block where if I'm feeling stressed like I was last night at two in the morning about a specific project, I can know that, well, I've got it scheduled from eleven till twelve, and then again from one till two, and then from three till four today to work on those things.

And that's when I will definitely do that and can put aside other things and focus on that because I know those other things I can do at another time when I'm not working on a client's project. The other way it's also helped me is, in when thinking of a new thing that I wanna do. Let's say I wanted to start a new podcast or or a new video show or or run a marathon or, you know, any number of random things, is I can look at my calendar and right away say, okay, well, I'm gonna do that, let's say I'd start a new podcast, well, that's gonna take me a good hour and a half every week. So where am I gonna put that in? And if I'm gonna put that in somewhere, then obviously something else has to come out, and so am I okay with that?

Whereas before I'd know that in the abstract, obviously, the more things you say yes to, then it fills up your schedule and the things you say no to is kind of freeing up time to do other things. But it was kind of just all ambiguous ambiguous as to which what was going where and what was what wasn't happening in other spaces. And so this has freed me up in a lot of ways to have a brainstorm list of things I wanna do and not really then until I'm ready to actually commit to putting it on the schedule, I don't really put any serious, muscle, physical, computer, digital work into starting that thing. And so I've really appreciated it so far. Mentally, it's helped me sort of relax in terms of a lot of I I'm I'm a bit of an ideas guy and not the I get bogged down in the 50% area of a project.

I like to finish stuff. I like to start stuff, but in the middle, kinda gets bogged down, and and I'm always happy to start something new at that point. And so this has freed me up into, and to the point where I think I'm gonna need just like an hour on Tuesdays or whatever day where I just throw in a, you know, brain fart section of just here here's time to just work on whatever the heck you want because, it is kinda like I don't know for sure what some of those little tangents that my brain will take. And I don't really like using up an evening or a weekend on some of those kinds of things. And so, if it can help me in any way with work or with, podcasting sort of like exercise, those kind of creative muscles, it it's something I need to be doing.

Alright. I know that thing here is probably all that relevatory or brand new if if you're at all disciplined in how you schedule and work and especially if you work for yourself, but, in particular, would guess if you're working for someone else, you're kind of on their clock. And so even if you do have a bit of freedom of what to do on a given hour or a given day, in general, if you're not getting the stuff done you're supposed to be doing, obviously, somebody's gonna be upset, your boss, manager, whoever. And for me, my boss has changed from time to time, so I don't have one client all the time. And so I do have some flexibility in that and that kind of is dangerous sometimes.

I can sort of get myself in trouble with having too much personal flexibility. And so this kind of scheduling seems to be working for now, and hopefully you even notice it in the days and weeks ahead with Daily ish where you should be getting on Monday, Wednesday, and Fridays, an episode of Daily ish going forward. And you can hold me to that. You can tweet at me I Chris on Twitter. [email protected] is my email address.

If you're a Patreon supporter, in the, Discord server that we have running, if you're a Patreon supporter and don't have access to that Discord server, our stuffy Slack thing, then please let me know and we'll make sure to get you in there if you want to be. Alright. Hope you have a great weekend. I've I was starting to get sick. I had a sore throat this morning yesterday and, feeling a little better now, but, we'll hopefully be all good by Monday.

Talk to you again. Bye.