How Can I Possibly Do All Of These Things?

How Can I Possibly do All of These Things?

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This Monday I’m adding extra weight to my already heavy schedule by starting my second semester at university. If I tell you I have started a blog, an Instagram and a Threads account you’ll have a solid case for taking me to a sanatorium. Besides having a demanding full-time software developer job, these are some of my other current activities: Gym almost every day, sometimes twice; running The C# Academy; creating content for my paid courses; teaching dance once a week; studying at least 1h a day, currently focusing on Pro Git and IOT. Oh and trying to learn several languages at the same time (what a fool 😆). And that’s just the tip of my iceberg to-do list. All of that while, of course, spending time with my beautiful wife so she doesn’t divorce me.

I consider myself an essentialist. I don’t own a lot of things, I don’t spend time scrolling on my phone and never watch TV (except for the world cup, of course, as a good Brazilian). Some of the things that give me the most pleasure are saying NO to requests for my time and throwing unused stuff in the bin. So why more? It might sound contradictory but I deemed these new activities important for my future and calculated that it’s possible to achieve them as long as I have good systems in place.

The next few months will be a test of my organization and discipline. I have a plan. Now I have to f-ing follow it. The general headquarters of my organization will be Google Calendar. I think it’s a great tool for having a big picture of one’s schedule. It’s great that I can combine it with Google Tasks and drag and drop tasks onto my calendar. I use the Getting Things Done method by the great David Allen. It’s an absolute game changer. To summarize, the idea is to dump every possible thing that’s in your mind into lists organized by topics and priority. When I first tried it, it felt like removing one ton off my back. I no longer had to worry about forgotten tasks that weren’t registered anywhere. Obviously the things I had to do hadn’t disappeared, but they were now accounted for, part of a system. Thank you David, I get much more done because of you.

I also use good old Excel and Productive, a gorgeous habit tracker to log my activities. I have a spreadsheet for logging hours in key activities and another for a “Discipline Log”, where I keep track of the habits I want to avoid or do more frequently. These logs are my first activity every day. I wake up tick the activities of the previous day. I find that the end of the day when I’m tired is way harder.

To keep track of my health, I use Fitbit. I have a Charge 5 and not only it monitors my sleep and heart rate, but its app has an excellent Food Tracker where I keep track of everything I eat most days. I’m not too hard on myself when I can’t track my food intake since sometimes it’s hard to find out what exactly is in your food, especially when eating out.

I know what some of you are thinking. You have two or three kids, a full time job, care for your elderly parents and still study at night. Yes, I totally appreciate that. I had these examples at home too. Mom and dad were absolute hustlers. I concede I have it easier than most. Someone on a minimum wage in Australia is in the top 3% highest income on the planet. No joke. Look it up – by the way, small rant: if you’re in a first world country complaining about life, just shush 😒. Ok, rant over – But it’s my obligation to do as much as I can with these privileges.

Speaking of which, time to bloody get back to work. The short-term goal? To succeed in keeping all my metrics moving in the right direction for the duration of this study semester. I’ll post the result in four months, if I’m still alive.

Wish me good luck, I’ll need it.