How large are these blocks of free time you desire? Hours, days, weeks? Maybe it would be helpful to incorporate those explicitly into your schedule.
Personally, I find it very useful to make schedules every day (usually I’ll make a day’s schedule the night before), including everything I need to do, when to do it, and scheduled time for short breaks. I include a large block of time at the end of the day with absolutely no obligations. I also take one day a week off completely, where I don’t work at all (unless some aspect of work just seems really fun that day).
This may seem obvious and won’t work for everyone, but I suspect most people haven’t even tried this.
Edit: In this way, your free time won’t feel like procrastination (which almost never feels as good as true free time), since it won’t be procrastination. When you take time off that you scheduled the night before as being free time, you’ll see it as “everything going according to plan,” rather than “putting off work that I should be doing right now.”
For me, a large enough block of time to make it alter my productivity in a positive way needs to be at least half of a day, but probably closer to a full day.
The main problem that has caused your preferred approach to fail in my case is that my workload is extremely unpredictable. It can appear as though I have divided things up well, but then I come to what I thought was a modular piece of a project only to realize that that modular piece is more difficult than all prior modular pieces put together, and that I’ve horribly under-budgeted time to do it (even after accounting for my initial attempt to egregiously over-budget the time it would take), and that, all of a sudden, I go from believing I am on schedule to believing that I have to cancel all planned relaxation time for the foreseeable future to catch up in response to the out of proportion modular piece.
Despite doing this over and over for years, writing down my experiences often, making concerted effort to become better at estimating the time cost of the modular pieces of my workload, and reading many things on how to beat procrastination and manage stress, I don’t feel that I am able to forecast the amount of time that different modular pieces of my workload will require with enough accuracy for my planning to be trusted regularly. I think it’s truly just the nature of the work that I do / work that I am assigned that it’s largely not knowable ahead of time whether I currently have the knowledge and skills to complete it efficiently or not. I only figure this out by attempting the work and, in real time, updating my schedule to reflect how ignorant I was about how much would be required to finish this new project.
When I used to work full-time, if I was assigned something that greatly exceeded my analytic or programming skills, I could usually explain this to a group leader and the task would be subdivided, or new time would be budgeted to account for me needing to learn new skills. Graduate school is not at all forgiving in this manner (which doesn’t make a lot of sense to me). If I can’t publish continuously, then I’m a detriment to my adviser who could have found someone willing to work more hours and with skills that did allow her or him to publish continuously. No time is allocated to self-teach and there is no teammate or group member to offload work onto in the event that my time has to be reprioritized. Similarly, coursework is much the same. If you have additional obligations and realize that you are not skilled enough to solve assignments in the allotted time, then you just fail (even if you could solve them given more time). I feel that events like this happen to me at least twice per week and that I am always scrambling to keep the workload bubble going long enough for me to make it to some sort of break when I can crash. Just wanted to articulate that in writing that others could see.
How large are these blocks of free time you desire? Hours, days, weeks? Maybe it would be helpful to incorporate those explicitly into your schedule.
Personally, I find it very useful to make schedules every day (usually I’ll make a day’s schedule the night before), including everything I need to do, when to do it, and scheduled time for short breaks. I include a large block of time at the end of the day with absolutely no obligations. I also take one day a week off completely, where I don’t work at all (unless some aspect of work just seems really fun that day).
This may seem obvious and won’t work for everyone, but I suspect most people haven’t even tried this.
Edit: In this way, your free time won’t feel like procrastination (which almost never feels as good as true free time), since it won’t be procrastination. When you take time off that you scheduled the night before as being free time, you’ll see it as “everything going according to plan,” rather than “putting off work that I should be doing right now.”
For me, a large enough block of time to make it alter my productivity in a positive way needs to be at least half of a day, but probably closer to a full day.
The main problem that has caused your preferred approach to fail in my case is that my workload is extremely unpredictable. It can appear as though I have divided things up well, but then I come to what I thought was a modular piece of a project only to realize that that modular piece is more difficult than all prior modular pieces put together, and that I’ve horribly under-budgeted time to do it (even after accounting for my initial attempt to egregiously over-budget the time it would take), and that, all of a sudden, I go from believing I am on schedule to believing that I have to cancel all planned relaxation time for the foreseeable future to catch up in response to the out of proportion modular piece.
Despite doing this over and over for years, writing down my experiences often, making concerted effort to become better at estimating the time cost of the modular pieces of my workload, and reading many things on how to beat procrastination and manage stress, I don’t feel that I am able to forecast the amount of time that different modular pieces of my workload will require with enough accuracy for my planning to be trusted regularly. I think it’s truly just the nature of the work that I do / work that I am assigned that it’s largely not knowable ahead of time whether I currently have the knowledge and skills to complete it efficiently or not. I only figure this out by attempting the work and, in real time, updating my schedule to reflect how ignorant I was about how much would be required to finish this new project.
When I used to work full-time, if I was assigned something that greatly exceeded my analytic or programming skills, I could usually explain this to a group leader and the task would be subdivided, or new time would be budgeted to account for me needing to learn new skills. Graduate school is not at all forgiving in this manner (which doesn’t make a lot of sense to me). If I can’t publish continuously, then I’m a detriment to my adviser who could have found someone willing to work more hours and with skills that did allow her or him to publish continuously. No time is allocated to self-teach and there is no teammate or group member to offload work onto in the event that my time has to be reprioritized. Similarly, coursework is much the same. If you have additional obligations and realize that you are not skilled enough to solve assignments in the allotted time, then you just fail (even if you could solve them given more time). I feel that events like this happen to me at least twice per week and that I am always scrambling to keep the workload bubble going long enough for me to make it to some sort of break when I can crash. Just wanted to articulate that in writing that others could see.
Thanks for taking the time to respond.