I would love to see something like this written by someone with a young family. I find myself living JIT subject to the whimsical demands of small children for extended periods, and often wonder if it's even possible to re-arrange life in this context to try to re-capture some sanity.
Usually I just give up and bathe myself in the chaos, hoping that it's just a few years and then some semblance of sanity will return naturally.
Stuff like this is useless for families. See his schedule. 7-830AM, time for "journaling"? Laughable. Try:
0600-0800 handling a bunch of small, very active and loud kids while doing laundry, kitchen, making breakfast, preparing lunch, dealing with constant messes, clothes.
0900-1200: deep (?) work, while constantly knowing you need to do like 12 baskets of laundry.
1200-1215: "lunch"
1215-1300: dealing with issue at school and sick family members.
3PM: "jimmy" comes over and poops his pants, sticks hands in poop and draws on walls.
1700: everybody is home again and the madness only now begins in earnest.
2000: "me"-time.
2100: winding down and preparing next day.
2200-0600: catch like 6 hours of sleep becayse of screaming baby, pissed pants, nightmares, whatever. All at once sometimes.
Self-employment is the only answer I have seen provided. From memory, some people said they were able to transition into it, some others implied they felt they only had the chance at contract work due to a long onramp they made for themselves working at it earlier in their life. Hopefully we'll get some anecdotes.
Well, I suppose there is teaching your children discipline; depends on what you mean by whimsical demands.
You're raising a great point. While I'm not living together with my partner, we do have a little family and I'm very much with you that it's super hard to get anything done with kids around.
Unless you get up super early, stay up super late after kids are in bed, or use the time when they aren't around (e.g. kindergarden), I also think that it's almost impossible to fully focus on something for a longer period.
I guess it kind of boils down to finding the right routines. That certainly doesn't make it easier...
Not a bad read, probably the most succinctly worded self-help piece regarding time management that I've seen so far. I'm still not convinced I have to live like that. The site is ironically called sovereign-individual, yet the author seems to have every minute of their life bound by a schedule. Is that our ultimate purpose as humans?
The question is why would they want to live like that? Are they still in control, or is it our capitalist society's firm grip on our lives that tells us we have to become ever more efficient, ever more robot-like?
It's a serious question about the meaning of life. Do we want our societies be run like Toyota factories?
Sorry for the late reply, I didn't realize people were actually commenting here...
So coming back to your question:
In my case, I'm lucky enough to work for a company that is entirely distributed and decentralized and doesn't actually tell me when and how long to work as long as the output is sound.
Obviously, in practice you most often have to put in some hours to get stuff done (that's what I'm being paid for after all). So while my work schedule isn't enforced, I chose for myself to work at these hours (not just for my employer) because I tend to function best at those hours.
Now... do I want to reserve several hours of each day for work for the rest of my life? Certainly not. But that's what work right now for me and it can and will totally change in the future.
> … "higher purpose (or something that motivates/obsesses me)."
The magic trick here is to find something you truly enjoy doing and then figure out how to get other people to pay you to do that thing for them. Contract work/freelancing can be a joyful and rewarding way to live a "sovereign" life. ;)
If you control that schedule, it could relax you because you don’t have to make prioritizing decisions in the moment. If other people control your schedule (as is true for many work environments, at least) then this level scheduling is most likely to be quite stressful.
Other people (generally) don’t control my schedule, so I do like like having blocks of time clearly marked out. But I’m much less fanatical: I just make my schedule the night before, and it’s generally a couple of 2-3 hour blocks with blank time inbetween. But it’s stress relieving for me to know, say, that my bills will be paid (or with autopay, supervised) at some point so that I can safely ignore the bills the rest of the time. Or to know that something bad isn’t going to happen because I went outside with a book for a few hours.
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[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 46.1 ms ] threadUsually I just give up and bathe myself in the chaos, hoping that it's just a few years and then some semblance of sanity will return naturally.
0600-0800 handling a bunch of small, very active and loud kids while doing laundry, kitchen, making breakfast, preparing lunch, dealing with constant messes, clothes.
0900-1200: deep (?) work, while constantly knowing you need to do like 12 baskets of laundry.
1200-1215: "lunch"
1215-1300: dealing with issue at school and sick family members.
3PM: "jimmy" comes over and poops his pants, sticks hands in poop and draws on walls.
1700: everybody is home again and the madness only now begins in earnest.
2000: "me"-time.
2100: winding down and preparing next day.
2200-0600: catch like 6 hours of sleep becayse of screaming baby, pissed pants, nightmares, whatever. All at once sometimes.
Good luck with your "brazilian jiu jitsu".
Well, I suppose there is teaching your children discipline; depends on what you mean by whimsical demands.
You're raising a great point. While I'm not living together with my partner, we do have a little family and I'm very much with you that it's super hard to get anything done with kids around.
Unless you get up super early, stay up super late after kids are in bed, or use the time when they aren't around (e.g. kindergarden), I also think that it's almost impossible to fully focus on something for a longer period.
I guess it kind of boils down to finding the right routines. That certainly doesn't make it easier...
I wish I could do that but it looks like I can't without meds or a higher purpose (or something that motivates/obsesses me).
It's a serious question about the meaning of life. Do we want our societies be run like Toyota factories?
If you have goals and you want to accomplish them, you'll want to be like that. At least for a period of time.
The thing is having the choice to do what you think it's best.
Sorry for the late reply, I didn't realize people were actually commenting here...
So coming back to your question:
In my case, I'm lucky enough to work for a company that is entirely distributed and decentralized and doesn't actually tell me when and how long to work as long as the output is sound.
Obviously, in practice you most often have to put in some hours to get stuff done (that's what I'm being paid for after all). So while my work schedule isn't enforced, I chose for myself to work at these hours (not just for my employer) because I tend to function best at those hours.
Now... do I want to reserve several hours of each day for work for the rest of my life? Certainly not. But that's what work right now for me and it can and will totally change in the future.
The magic trick here is to find something you truly enjoy doing and then figure out how to get other people to pay you to do that thing for them. Contract work/freelancing can be a joyful and rewarding way to live a "sovereign" life. ;)
Other people (generally) don’t control my schedule, so I do like like having blocks of time clearly marked out. But I’m much less fanatical: I just make my schedule the night before, and it’s generally a couple of 2-3 hour blocks with blank time inbetween. But it’s stress relieving for me to know, say, that my bills will be paid (or with autopay, supervised) at some point so that I can safely ignore the bills the rest of the time. Or to know that something bad isn’t going to happen because I went outside with a book for a few hours.