Well, for the polyphasic sleep…I haven’t been doing it lately. I had a few oversleeps and stuff so I recently decided to try and go back to normal sleep and then start over. I think this may have been a mistake…now I feel like I am getting WAY too much sleep and I pretty much feel like crap. I also keep getting really tired ANYWAYS and end up taking another nap but since I was trying to go normal they end up being like 3-5 hours long. This is very bad and I wake up feeling much much worse than before. Today, as of writing this I will definitely go back with polyphasic sleep and STICK with it. I am considering writing an alarm clock application that will play on my computer to help wake me up so I don’t have to keep setting my alarm clock each 4 hours.

Now, for increasing my productivity…I’ve tried a few things, but most recently I believe I have found something which will help me out a lot. Well, for 10 days I kept a detailed log of EVERYTHING that I did every 15-30 minutes. This really gave me insight into where all of my time was being spent. I have set up some things to help keep myself focused now. Here is what I have done and so far it has been working for the last 2 days:

• I will work ATLEAST 8 hours a day (whether on freelance, or on my game)
• I will keep a “To-Do Later” list of all of the blogs, articles, etc… that come up during the day that I feel the need to spend time on. If I still feel I should check it out later, AFTER all of my work is done…then I will get to it.
• I will take forced breaks / lunches during my 8+ hour period of working…just to keep myself at peak performance.

Well, that’s about it really. Sometimes the best solution is the simple one. So far this has kept me in check, we will see in about a week from now how this works out.

I am going to use the rest of the month of Feb as sort of a “30 day” trial. They say it takes 21 days to break a habit, so in order to cut down on my time wasting I am going to completely cut out all games, forums, online articles, etc… from my day. This is actually going to be pretty hard, as I have come very used to going through all of these things each day. Basically, I am going to act as if I do not have the internet…save for posting to my website here.

That leaves me with a clear plan for the day. I really tend to suck at following schedules, and I’ve tried many many different time management ideas and planners. Really, the thing has works best for me is to just have a clear goal of what I want to get done…and break it down to as many smaller parts as possible, and then just start knocking out each thing.

In broad terms, what I would like to do over the month of Feb is:

• Finish my next game
• Write several articles for this website
• Get fully adapted to polyphasic sleep
• Get into the routine of running each morning

I’ll leave out how I break those things into smaller parts, as that tends to change as I get through it.

I’ll be sure to keep updates on this in my daily log.