What Would a Perfect Day Be Like
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Over at his blog Ravi Vora is asking the question, “What is your big dream?”
To me it’s a day filled with things I enjoy: a day spent writing, being with my family and reading. Of course I’d also like to travel more, spend some days only lying on my bed reading great books, and finally have enough time to get started with Sam & Max Season 1.
But here’s a brief breakdown of what a great working day could be like:
5:00 Wake up. Finish the sourdough bread dough from yesterday and leave it to raise.
5:30 Grab a cup of coffee and start writing a blog post for my personal blog.
6:30 Blog post done. Make breakfast and wake up Mari and Oiva.
7:00 Check e-mail, Facebook and blog comments. Reply to people writing to me, and try to think of people who would be happy to hear from me today.
8:00 Go through the RSS feeds in my feed reader to see what’s happening in the blogging world. Comment on one or two posts and send e-mail to people whose posts touched me this morning.
9:00 Back to writing: This time work on something that pays the bills, like freelance writing for magazines and bigger blogs.
12:00 Lunch time. Cooking real, home-made food takes a while, but it’s worth the effort. Eat together with Mari and Oiva.
13:00 Second round of e-mail.
13:30 Back to writing again. This could also be the time for web design or some small programming tasks depending on what I need to do, but on the perfect day I would be working on a novel.
15:00 Stop working. By this time I have been working already more than eight hours and my family wants to spend some more time with me. So I would play with Oiva, go for a walk (or shopping) with Mari and just do whatever we would like to do that day.
17:00 Bake the bread and make a starter for the next day’s dough.
19:00 Check my blog to see if there are new comments (in real life I would probably be doing this all the time as I’m doing now. But in theory doing it once or twice in a day should be just enough). Reply to comments and e-mail messages.
20:00 Get ready for sleep: take a shower, put on my pajamas, and feed Oiva.
21:00 Go to bed with a good book. Read for a while, then chat with Mari for a few more moments, and get to sleep around 22:00.
How does it sound to you?
Of course a day can never be quite as clearly formatted. Anyone who has children knows that there’s no way you can plan that “I will play with my son from 15:00 to 17:00. Then take a break and play some more from 18:00 to 20:00″ or “I will feed him at 20:00 and then put him to sleep.”
So yeah, this is a simplified version. But it shows pretty well how I would like to mix my daily household routines with my working time and have as much time with my family as I can.
How does your dream day look like? Share it here, or even better, describe your big dream to Ravi.
I hope you’ll have a great day today!
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September 21st, 2007 at 4:46 pm
Wow that’s quite a schedule. :) I don’t know how you do it. I’m not sure I could.
September 21st, 2007 at 5:55 pm
Well, I’m not doing it… It’s just my dream schedule ;)
My real schedule is more like this:
5 AM: Get up, grab a cup of coffee and write a blog post
6:20: Leave for work. The bus trip takes about half an hour which I usually spend reading
7:00: Start work. Check e-mail, plan for the day, and then get to coding
11:00: Lunch
11:30: Back to work
15:00: Head home. This way the trip takes about 45 minutes - an hour. Spend the time reading.
16:00: At home. Take care of the baby and spend time with Mari
18:00: Check blog stuff. Answer comments, check e-mail and so on. If there’s time, bake some bread (like today)
The evening is pretty much about taking care of Oiva, and then at some point if there is time, I work on my writing.
21:00: Oiva gets to sleep
22:00: Mari and I go to bed, usually fall into sleep quite immediately ;)
So, if you compare my dream schedule and my real one you notice that some of the ingredients are the same, while in my dream schedule there would be more time dedicated to writing (i.e. work would mean writing in some human language instead of the computer languages I spend my days writing at the moment ;)
What about you? What’s your schedule like, and what would you want it to be like?
September 22nd, 2007 at 1:55 am
You know it’s actually really interesting to peek into a bloggers life. I like to hear about what other people do all day. Maybe its just me… maybe i’m weird.. but its kind of cool
Jarkko where do you work / what type of work do you do?
September 22nd, 2007 at 7:05 am
Yeah, peeking into people’s lives is really interesting. I like it a lot as well :)
I work at a mobile game development company (one of the top players in the field, I suppose) as a programmer. I used to be a game programmer, but recently switched to network programming - so I work with game servers and such things.
What about you?
September 23rd, 2007 at 8:30 am
I’m glad you listed your actual day, because I was starting to get jealous of your dream day. Like you, I am a computer programmer, but I write business apps instead of games. And again like you, I wish I could work from home as a writer as well.
But since I’m a bit older than you, I’m planning that actual “dream life” in only about 8 years, when my wife and I plan on retiring - a bit earlier than the average.