Manic Monday

At the end of February, Ravelry announced that it had reached 4,000,000 users (watch out Facebook!) I use this online tool all the time, for planning my own projects, tracking pattern popularity and even getting a guest-amite about how much yarn a particular design may end up taking. As part of their celebration, the team at Ravelry made up a series of info graphics demonstrating various data points about their users. You can read them all here, or just click past the break to see what struck me as most interesting. 

It was this little guy showing what the most users are doing on a particular day of the week. If you have read this blog for a while, it won't surprise you that this got me to thinking about my own productivity. Many in the world of productivity advocate for blocks of time, or even entire days, devoted to a certain type of work. Either meetings, content creation, networking, or whatever else one may do in a typical week. 

I was actually working on the ongoing project of updating and formalizing my design portfolio, when I kind of got bored or tired of the same type of thinking and organizing. That reminded me that Mondays are a day that I try to blog. Which in turn reminded me of this very simple graphic. 

While I do not always do the same things on the same days in large chunks of time, what would I get done if I attempted this? 

Do I even have enough different things to break them into different days to work on? 

Would I end up adding in other tasks and priorities to fill up those other days? 

In theory, I like to at least have my blog posts for the week planned out on Mondays, if not written up and scheduled. This does not always happen, and for the very good reason that if I want to do a "finished Friday" type of post, I need to actually finish something. I also try to batch photography, which can vary from week to week how that will look based on finished objects, model availability, and natural light. Obviously, actual knitting gets batched by default because in so many cases its easier to sit down for a relatively long chunk of time to finish something than to do little bits throughout the day. 

So what else could I be batching? I would say that actual writing and content creation could be batched, but I never seem to be able to sit still for longer than a couple hours to work on a pattern. Which tends to be all it takes as I like to write out my notes carefully as I work out a piece, so I typically just need to transcribe my notes into the computer. (Who am I kidding, by transcribe I do mean translate from illustrations and arrows into written word that other humans will be able to understand). 

This week I am going to take some time to track what I do, when, and for how long (this is not a new resolution for me). Hopefully I can find some patterns and commonalities. Perhaps I can even find a way to get a bit more productivity through having assigned days for certain types of projects. 

Do you find yourself saving chores for certain days? Or certain types of work projects that can only get effectively done in the morning? I'd love to hear about it!