A difficult thought I’ve had recently: Can it be possible to get things done without scheduling free time?  I mean, this feels a little counter-intuitive.  I guess you could just set up a schedule to include everything but free time.  This inevitably creates sections of free time in your schedule though.  It seems a little inevitable if you’re scheduling anything at all.  Then there’s the issue of over-scheduling.  Where can there be a middle ground?  Well, something I once heard called zero planning.

Zero Planning: An attempt to schedule blocks of ‘required’ ‘flexible’ and ‘very flexible’ within a calendar.

Sunbird!

For my calendar, I use Sunbird, an open source program that allows for the ability to create multiple calendars.  In here there are multiple calendars grouped by shared tasks.  For instance I have a ‘Screen’ calendar for my day job, an ‘0wn1t’ calendar for this blog, ‘Personal Projects’ calendar for projects and so on.

ZeroPlanned…

In order to create ‘required’ ‘flexible’ and ‘very flexible’ I used a color scheme and attached these separate calendars to colors within their respective scheme.  the ‘Screen’ and ‘Personal’ calendars being the most important and set-in-stone, deserved greyscaled schemes, the ‘0wn1t’ and ‘Education’ calendars are shades of green for their flexibility, and ‘Personal Projects’ fits into a blue, very flexible standpoint.

But what about free time?

The free time I griped about earlier represents much more easily in a ‘zero planned’ calendar.  Any gap between times counts as free time, and any blue area has a high possibility of being free time, and green areas become free time every once in a while.

Basically anywhere there’s color or whitespace, free time exists! 

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 13th, 2008 at 11:47 am and is filed under Computer, Life.