At the moment there is a time I have more stress as normally and I’m not expecting the stress to get less over the next 6 weeks. Most it is according to my school’s final tests at the end of this 6 weeks and some other school projects which are due to the 25th of May. This stress lead to some thoughts about my time management.
One first thought was if I need to cut down from two posts per week down to just one per week. Till now I am willing to try to stick to that schedule. The main reason for that is that I need to come over problems. If I have a steady job, I can’t just say that I have no time to get the job done, it just needs to get done. I don’t see this blog as a job but as a opportunity, like I already wrote, for improving my writing and english. And one second reason is that these times full of stress train me at self discipline and force me into a stage were I need to rethink some habits.
For example I had to rethink my time spend daily with reading Twitter and skimming my rss-reader. Twitter is great to stay informed about different topics and different persons, weather the persons around you in real life or just random people from around the web. I had somewhat about 60 people I followed and that was OK as long as I used TweetDeck for my twitter client cause it has the ability to organize people in groups and that gave me the chance to focus on one particular group of people I’m really interested in. Doing that I noticed that I never read the tweets of many people I followed, just because they were not that relevant to me. The logical result was that I unfollowed about half the people I was following at the time. These people were mainly people who are very popular or write way to many tweets per day so that they didn’t post anything I would like to read, rather than replies to people asking questions which don’t interst me. Now I just follow about 35 people and since I use Tweetie I read all messages this people send out.
But maybe one relevant aspect of unfollowing these people: It was not about the people themselves. It was about what I’m interested in. Most of these people write blogs and if they write relevant posts, I’m still reading their blog/rss but many just do not post relevant tweets.
But what is it about the RSS-Reader? I tended to read as much as possible just to stay on top of the happenings. These habit also had to be rethought. Reading about 100 rss-freeds I needed to get rid of some. In the end I got the count down to 69 feeds. The once I deleted were mostly Tutorial like blogs which posted one or two tutorials per day. The problem was that I don’t have the time to get through this massive load of tutorials to do them and to learn the stuff they would like teach me. My decision was that I’m going to check these sites once in a while to see if there was any interesting tutorial and may do that but not in times which are as stressful as the once right now.
One foot note: This post was written in a state of stress and no time, so it’s greatly possible that the decisions I took were wrong or not the best but they worked — and may work in the future — for me. I get a little relaxed and can focus on the main points which need to get ready in time.
