This could be useful to some readers here. If this post looks like it has no relevance, say, after two paragraphs, justclick it off your radar screen.-Ron Price, Australia
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April 1999 to April 2005
Six Years of Retirement
A Study in Time Management
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A. 6 STAGE/CATEGORY TIME DELINEATION
FOR STUDYING AND WRITING EACH DAY
The statistical information below attempts to outline the time I spend on a daily, monthly and yearly basis at the tasks I have set myself to accomplish, in the form of goals or as a result of serendipitous activity, during the first six years of retirement. The data below is a guesstimation only for I did not keep daily statistics. Since I must attend to various domestic tasks, community activities, family, Baha'i and 'other' matters it would appear that seven hours per day is about the most realistic average time allocation spent at reading/studying/writing.
CATEGORY NO OF HOURS PER CENT OF MONTH AT EACH LEVEL
1. Super-efficient : 10-12 hours 5%
2. Very Efficient : 8-10 hours 20%
3. Efficient : 6-8 hours 60%
4. Good : 4-6 hours 5%
5. Poor : 2-4 hours 5%
6. Very Poor : 0-2 hours 5%
B. STATISTICAL TOTALS
Number of days at the above six levels in a thirty day(month) period:
1. 2 days @ 11 hours= 22 hours
2. 6 days @ 9 hours= 54 hours
3. 18 days @ 7 hours=126 hours
4. 2 days @ 5 hours= 10 hours
5. 1 days @ 3 hours= 3 hours
6. 1 days @ 1 hour= 1 hours
Total: 216 hours/month; or 216/30= 7 hours per day.=49 hours/week
This is about 1/3 of the 664 hours available in each month)
(720 less 56 for sleep=664).
B.LIST OF MAJOR ACTIVITIES & TIME ALLOCATION:
1999-2006
1. Reading and writing, as above: 32%
2. Sleeping : 33%
3. Baha'i Activities: 5%
4. Domestic Activities: 10%
5. Non-Baha'i Activities: 10%
6. Family: 10%
Total: 100%
C. DETAILS REGARDING READING AND WRITING ACTIVITIES:
From August 1999 to August 2006, exactly six years, I wrote:
1. Three books on: (i) Roger White's Poetry: 400 pages, (ii) Autobiography: 1000 pages and (iii) My Website:1100 pages.Total: 2500 Pages.
2. 20 booklets and of poetry, some 800 poems.
2. When not working on a book or writing in some other genre I: (a) read, (b) make notes, (c) reorganize my files & systems, (d) post internet items and develop these WWW resources and (e) engage in one of ‘B: items 3 to 6’ above.
Our experience of the world gets filed away in the bank vaults of our minds and is often taken out of the bank as the years go on to help us cope with our world and help us feel more comfortable with it or to sting us with guilt, make our world grey with sadness, indeed, colour our world in a multitude of ways. Some neuropsychologists and neuroscientists, who study memory among other topics, argue that what we need as a survival package for better, wiser, more useful memory retrieval and a stimulating mental life is very active mental-brain life. We need to push our brains to their limit. A sound mind in a sound body is an old maxim which is often used as part of an emphasis on the sound body. But the message these scientists have from their fields which were born just the other day is concerned with how to have a sound mind. And it would seem that I am well on the road to keeping and preserving such a mind. I’ve just got the organic components in place in the last several years. Now, one might add, I’m ready to fly.
Social cognitive neuroscience, a discipline which aims to understand the psychology and neuroscience of person-to-person interaction, focuses on what are called mirror neurons, a set of cells in the frontal lobe of the brain. This is part of what is called ‘theory of mind’ and is aimed at increasing our capacity and our efficiency in relating to others. After 60 years of life, decades of relating to others and many years devoted to the study of interpersonal interaction, I am happy to give some of my time to this study and some time to its application in everyday life but, for the most part, I have other things I both want to study and want to do with my time in these early years of late adulthood.
D. CONCLUDING STATEMENT
The above provides an overview of the new arrangements, the new time allocations in my life in the years 1999 to 2005 since retiring from the teaching profession and what had been in the decades before living a life within the great work/home, school/home divide with its extensive involvement in Baha'i community activities, formal employment, raising children and studying in formal education programs, inter alia. All statistics/data above are guesstimations only and how long this new picture will last is difficult to estimate.
One recent writing activity is worth describing in some detail and this description follows. By April 2005 the process of searching out sites, mostly forums for posting and publishing various items of my writing, responding to issues raised on the sites and engaging with specific individuals at these sites, had developed far more than I had anticipated four years before in April 2001, at the start of this site and internet searching process. My own internet site or webpage went into its second edition in May 2001 by which time I had become conscious of some of the potential to place my writing on internet sites.
In the embryonic years of my internet life, 1990 to 2000, and the life of my website when it began in 1997, I had no idea of the potential for placing the name of the Cause or my writings on this world wide web. In those years the internet was essentially a source of information. Now, as the 5th year of searching out sites for posting or publishing items begins, it has become difficult to keep a detailed and accurate record of my postings or, indeed, to even service or log-in to all the sites at a greater rate than once/month, if that. This activity, of acquiring and servicing sites, came to occupy my time intensively in 2004. Early in 2004, after completing my third book, the fourth edition of my autobiography Pioneering Over Four Epochs, I began seeking a writing outlet and the internet satisfied this search. I keep going back to it when I am unable to work on my book or books, when I get tired of reading and when I want “little writing and posting jobs” that I know will contribute in its own way to the teaching work.
----apologies to thos who prefer short bite-sized posts-------
Time Management for One's Activity: One Person's Experience
Linear Mode
