Week 1 at my first 9 to 5; Timemanagment (Weekly Update #1)

[OskarT]

Hello you guys,


The last 5 days were week 1 of what could be considered to be my first 9 to 5 job. And in my first weekly update I will talk about my experience trying to optimize my routine to get things done on my entrepreneurial project (for last few months developing a multiplayer video game similar to mario party) inspite of my new obligation.


In my country we have mandatory civil service / military service and I decided to work as a paramedic. So for the next 9 months I will work ~ 40 hours / week for the ambulance in my city. The first 2 months consist of paramedic training with multiple exams at the end.
During training I have fixed hours from 8 - 16:30 every day.


In the first week my goal was to establish a good routine around my new job.
Every weekday has looked pretty much like this:


My morning-routine takes a lot of time because I meditate and journal, shower, prepare and eat porridge ...
but I think it is worth the time I spend on it.


With everything pretty much optimized I get 2.25h of free-time in the evening. And I think that using this time efficiently will make a big difference in the long run.
This week I admittedly didn't get that much done on my entrepreneurial venture and wasted some of the time.

I used it to:

• try fixing my bike which I kind of screwed up => took longer than expected => got frustrated and ate ice cream with my family (Monday)
• watch Friends episodes on Netflix (4x 25min)
• help out my aunt with IT over a video call (1.5h, Tuesday)
• recap and write down what I have learned in the paramedic course (4h)
• plan the next step with my Game and how to get market-mind feedback as soon as possible (30min)
• started developing a user-friendly and self-explanatory Menu for the Game that makes it possible for others to play the game without my help/supervision (30min)
• played beach-volleyball with new people I met at the paramedic training (2h)

I found out that using every minute of the day is easier said than done and it is essential to account for things that might come up and to not allow oneself to be distracted from the thing one should be doing eventhough begining to feel tired.

I would like to point out that I intend to invest time outside of my job learning for the paramedic exams (next one is on Friday) and generally to be a good paramedic. So in the training phase I will have less time for business. However I will try to get done as much as possible regardless.

I have come to the conclusion that it would be smart to do all the learning in the evenings throughout the week 1-2 h /day and try to keep the weekend free to get in large blocks of programming because this way I will be able to use time better because it always takes some time to get into the flow again with coding so 1-2h blocks aren’t really that effective and also on the weekend I will have more energy available.

Today being Saturday I spent 6.5 h programming on my game further bringing it to a state where it will make sense to share it on the Internet to get feedback (implemented: connection management, error-handling, understandable UI for Joining and Hosting Sessions). And spent 2.5 h helping my aunt through TeamViewer with her IT-Problems (was a nice experience to be able to provide some value with my skills).

For tomorrow I have invited over some friends to play some games and/or watch a movie + I will go running + plan the next week and next priority for game development.

Please let me know if you have any suggestions for how to get things done on business while working a full-time job.
Thank you for reading my first weekly progress update! I am also really interested in how you manage your time and the difficulties you might experience / lessons you have learned.

 

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