This last workweek before Christmas always seems a bit frantic. I’m trying to get ahead of all content for late December and early January, but then there’s a lot of Christmas work to be done too. Today will be present triaging and wrapping — the upside of which is that my office should be a lot less cluttered by the end of the day. But we have to get there!
There is also the usual mix of extra activities — such as the middle school band concert last night. They do all four grades on the same night but in sequence. So the 5th grade played at 6:30, then the 6th grade around 6:50, then there was about a 20-minute break to move people out, then the 7th grade played at 7:30, then the jazz band, then the 8th grade around 8:15 (a slight delay, as a child got very sick on stage — oh dear — it’s going around). Since I have a child in the 5th grade band, the jazz band, and the 8th grade band, we got there at 6 p.m. for the first call, and were there until 8:45 or so. A long night.
As I crank through things this week, I’ve realized that even after 10-plus years of time tracking, my time estimation is still sometimes off. For instance, I planned to get through all the Before Breakfast episodes for the week of Jan 5-9 on Monday morning — that is, I would write them, edit them, practice, them, record them, and send the sound files in. But for some reason I wound up writing longer than usual on some of the episodes (I guess I had a lot to say?) I was barely done writing by my 12:30 p.m. virtual training session. So afterwards I was doing my editing — and that took longer than usual because the scripts were longer. Then recording took longer as it turned out instead of 4-5 minute episodes, most of them for that week were more like 6-7 minute episodes. I did not get to anything I planned to do on Monday afternoon on Monday afternoon.
It is not the end of the world, of course — I have the rest of the week to do things and I have open time. The fact that I am recording a January 9th episode on December 15th suggests that there is a big buffer in all of this. But…I probably should have seen that coming.
Time tracking does help with time estimation overall, though. If you’re looking for an opportunity to track your time, please consider doing my annual Time Tracking Challenge, running from Jan 12-19 this year. You can sign up here to get a time log and daily motivational emails from me. In past years we’ve had well over 1000 people participating. I’ll post my time logs here that week. This is also giving me a nudge to think through what I want to see on my time logs that week!
I recorded an episode of Best of Both Worlds yesterday featuring a very fun guest — I’m looking forward to sharing that in the new year!
I just signed up for the time tracking challenge. I love doing it every year and then comparing those weeks. This year I’ll be traveling in Boston that week so it will be a little different, but also not because I travel twice/month generally. I’ll probably get more sleep than average since no one will be waking me at night! Hurrah!
Ugh, getting sick on stage. yikes!!!
@Lisa – thanks for signing up. And I felt so bad for that kid! Anyone can get sick (and a lot of people are) but when it happens in public it’s just…memorable.