I see both your comments about having a flexible/free enough schedule to pull this off, but I don’t think of those restrictions as barriers to entry, necessarily. One GETS control of one’s time by TAKING control of as much of it as possible, and working from there towards being able to do what you want full-time, I think.

Granted, I picked this schedule because, due to immanent life-changes, I’m about to have most of my days pretty much free for a little while, and I wanted to make sure to use every stitch of that time to further my writing and blogging goals. So starting in a few weeks, I do hope to be able to use it from 8:30 – 5:30, as stated (with a break for a nap, heh). But after that period — which will be crazy in its own ways — I’ll need to go back to work again, probably in a more restrictive environment than I’ve been in the last couple years (I’ve already started crossing my fingers that I can *keep* my afternoon nap, but it’s too far out to tell yet). After that, I want to use this method to manage the “writing time” I have, which will amount to mornings and evenings, basically; and perhaps some commute time as well.

What I hope to take away from this experiment is a way to maximize the productivity of (what will probably for quite some time be) my side-career, writing. I’m hoping that by setting aside certain times for certain goals, I can both develop good habits, and use the pressure to keep myself focused and productive. Right now it’s absolutely true that my efforts, while significant, are scattered and not nearly as productive in results-terms as I’d like. And I should report that, even though I’m still at work all day, I have on-and-off periods of fallow time now, so I’ve been using a very basic version of the schedule already, to help make the most of my “free time” at work. And though it’s only day two, I’m tentatively impressed — I’ve minimized aimless surfing, put real words on paper, and done several “icky” administrative tasks that I normally avoid like the plague, just because I drew up a chart of how and where I wanted my time to go. I get interrupted all the time, and yes, when work interrupts I *have* to let it — but even so, I got more done yesterday (with several hefty interruptions, such as a lunch-meeting and installing a tricky printer) than on any Monday in my entire memory, even ones where it was genuinely dead here and I COULD have written all day.

So tentatively, I’m optimistic. And while I agree that certainly not every life can fit in 8 hours of uninterruptible work-time and on-demand scheduling, I think that most lives have time that could be better used by organizing it into productive chunks, and being as serious as possible about getting those things done *in that time*. (Funny example — yesterday one of the interruptions ate up the time I was going to work on a certain short-story that I’d been meaning to edit, and not gotten to, for weeks. But when I didn’t get to it yesterday, I was way upset about it, and made darn sure to get to it this morning — simply because of the schedule.)

Think about it: If all you had was an hour a day, but you were determined that the first half would be writing, then 15 minutes for submissions and 15 minutes to answer blog & forum posts from other writers, wouldn’t you be using the HELL out of that time, compared to if you just thought of it as “general writing time”? And wouldn’t it be worth doing the scheduling and yelling at people to keep your hour intact, for what you could accomplish with it? (One thing that’s occurred to me as I think about it is that I can, if I’m focused, write 1,000 words in less than an hour. Which means I could write every bit of two novels a year, if I could just get a solid hour of writing time a day. And yet I’ve never managed that before!)

Thanks to both of you for the fantastic discussion, as always! We have GOT to hang out sometime. ;)

http://calnewport.com/blog/2008/04/23/the-science-of-procrastination-revisted-researchers-rethink-willpower/

One of the better take-aways: doing the thing for how you think it will look to others (“ego-oriented”) is draining; doing it for yourself (“task-oriented”, or I suppose “autotelic”) is energizing. If I truly loved everything I was making progress on, it would be easy to kick everything else out of my life. I’ll settle for second best: doing stuff where I don’t really care what other people think, even if I don’t always like what I need to do to get somewhere with it.

(I’ve got a personal software project going right now based on an theoretical framework that’s not gotten much attention or recognition; and for implementing the basic ideas, I’m using a programming language that’s pretty obscure. I find don’t much care — both the framework and the language seem like the best fit for what I want to do. Very recently, it occurred to me that it’s actually kind of nice that they are both rather obscure. It means I don’t so much pressure to care what other people think of my project, since they wouldn’t know what to think of it anyway.)

That said, Brice has a point: you need to have the kind of life you can kick things out of. At least for a certain number of hours a day (perhaps 6 or 7) during which interruptions can be effortlessly fended off or solidly walled off.

From experience, I know people are unwilling to complain – so any disruption is potentially disastrous (any complaint essentially represents hundreds of people) and disrupts a person (hundreds) who is paying tens of thousands (millions) of dollars a year to attend my school.

So, in a sense… yes, sounds cool. In a sense, it doesn’t make sense. I had a person last week call me from Morocco after not being able to search any database for over a week. She was willing to accept that she couldn’t search any database for over a week even though she was paying $1350-1750 per course.

That same week an entire class couldn’t access LexisNexus, complained only to their professor, who only got in touch with us a week later. At 30 students at $1350 a class with 13 weeks a semester, that is $3115 in lost productivity (assuming that access to our resources equals their entire cost of attendance, which is debatable, it could easily be more considering we pour millions of dollars into purchasing access to these materials).

Regardless, I’m willing to bet Cal Newport doesn’t have that kind of money on the line. It’s probably just his name and names don’t mean much regardless of who you are.

And 22 emails an hour? Please, I hope I never have to work with him.

I’m keen on the idea of limiting the periods of time that I am available and making strict schedules but I’m not so sure that it can easily fit in an 8 hour work day. I’d like to give it a try, but more flexible. I don’t have a baby that is mutually exclusive from work. I have (metaphorical) babies that easily overlap with my career path.