Optimizing Me

This is my first medium post! I thought it would be about android development instead it is ME(personal) development.

Little introduction: I am an android developer. I just finished university education and got a job as an android developer about a month ago and this brought about a major change: Most of the ME time I enjoyed vanished. I am an introvert hence I really needed my free time to think, learn and engage in other hobbies I enjoy. Thus began my search for ways to carve out my ME time.

I was concerned about how my day was spent. I could only outline few tasks I achieved in a day, in essence, I had vague memory of my daily activities.

What you cannot measure, you cannot improve

Oh I forgot to add, I love Medium! During my usual habits of reading medium posts, I encountered the above quote and it resonated within me. I read several productivity posts afterwards by Benjamin Hardy, Thomas Oppong, Charles Chu amongst others, then I finally decided to change how I approached my day. This is what I did:

I bought a diary!

Yes I did! In my part of the world, diary-keeping is kinda seen as a female thing so I called mine a journal :) so my friends would not laugh at me (one actually did anyway). In this journal, I wrote down all tasks I wanted to achieve for the day and starred 3 most important tasks for the day: my day would be considered a success if these 3 were achieved. At the end of the day, I logged into my journal how I spent my day- how I achieved the tasks I did and why I did not complete the rest.

“If you have more than three priorities, then you don’t have any.” — Jim Collinsin

What I gained from Journal-keeping

1. I became more organized.
2. I now have an answer to “what next?”
3. It is easier to say NO to unimportant things.
4. I feel I am more focused and productive.
5. There is this cool feeling you get when you at tasks you marked as accomplished.
6. It is easier to identify productive and unproductive trends when I read through my journal, for example, I had to cut down social media activities (Whatsapp especially) in order to meet my daily goals.

With the journal routine in place, I realized I had to carve out more time to increase my task-completion rate. I work for 8 hours(9am — 5pm) plus about 5 hours I spend commuting to and fro, which sums it up to 13 hours. This implies I had about 11 hours to sleep, eat and do all other activities. I will be writing on this in the second part of this series. For now, I leave you with this:

“The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another; and his humblest hour is when he compares the volume as it is with what he vowed to make it.” ― J.M. Barrie

PS: I would really appreciate suggestions/feedback as I am just a novice in this area. Please Recommend and share if you found this useful.