It’s baffling that Mr. Productivity Crusader myself didn’t figure this one out earlier: it pays to organize and catalogue where my Bonanzle hours are being spent. I’ve done it at my day job for the last six months or so. I keep an open Excel spreadsheet that provides me a minute-by-minute breakdown of where my time is being spent during a given day, week, or milestone. Using Excel’s Pivotcharts, I can then aggregate results from my spreadsheet to reveal meta-patterns such as “Mondays are usually administrative-heavy” and “Milestones where I have the time to program go more smoothly.”
The other simple-stupid and supremely insightful fact from these spreadsheets? How much time I really spend each week working. Since I’ve held myself strictly accountable for my minutes, I’ve reduced my garbage Internet time from about a half hour a day to basically none.
But I hadn’t thought to apply any of these techniques to Bonanzle. Partly because there is some energy-overhead in being that responsible. Partly because I have had too many things to do to be able to precisely define what I ought to be doing and what I am doing. But that changes now. Partner or none, there are enough different areas that require my attention at this point that I’m going to start maintaining a simple list of what I plan to do for the week, and how much time I’d like to allocate to it. And what do ya know? Blogging got two hours this week!
I’m looking forward to determining just how much time I am dedicating to this site on a weekly basis. From my rough (and somewhat conservative) projections for this week, it looks like I’ll be spending about 30 hours on it. Add that to my 40 hour work week, and that goes a long way toward explaining some of those rough mornings. It also goes a long way toward explaining how I know that this site will work out to the extent I can be disciplined to spend my hours smartly; particularly since my hours are matched by those invested by the growing Bonanzle cadre.