Temporal Discipline

This is the Temporal Discipline challenge. It is the equivalent to financial discipline but applied to time, 'tempus' meaning 'time' in Latin. The goal is to spend time wisely.

Unlike with money, everybody has more or less the same time budget. I copied my approach to time from somebody I can't quite remember but here it is: every day is divided into 100 blocks of 10 minutes each - the remaining 7 hours 20 minutes are allocated for sleep.

For each day, I draw a 10x10 grid where each cell corresponds to one 10min block. I use coloured pencils to fill the cells as time passes. There are three types of cells and three corresponding colours.

Red means waste; the time expense that was without much benefit and if the discipline were stronger, it wouldn't have occurred. Ideally there would be zero red cells.

Blue means maintenance; the time expense that is necessary for sustaining life - food, hygiene and (depending on the individual) work. The number of blue cells must be non-zero however it should not take up 100% otherwise we stagnate.

Green means investment; the time expense that has no immediate benefit but will payoff later, improving our health, abilities, knowledge, character, etc. It includes studying, building relationships, working out, practicing skills and so forth. The number of green cells should be as high as possible.

If you'd like, join in and share your red, blue and green counts for each day. Hopefully the daily check-ins will lead to improvements over time.

Let's keep this running for April and see what happens.

 

April 1st

Red: 65
Blue: 35
Green: 0

 

April 2nd
Red: 72
Blue: 27
Green: 1

 

April 3rd
Red: 59
Blue: 39
Green: 2

 

April 4th
Red: 93
Blue: 6
Green: 1

 

April 5th
Red: 97
Blue: 3
Green: 0

 

April 6th
Red: 98
Blue: 2
Green: 0

Time to make some changes before it's too late.

 

April 7th
Red: 85
Blue: 12
Green: 3

 

As you can see I dropped it as well.