Tom Grady and I with students |
I don't JUST work 90 minutes, I work 90 minutes at a time with a break in between. When I'm not on tight deadline I work 90 minutes with a half hour break between. During the break I make coffee, I check my email, I browse Amazon-- all the stuff I would normally waste my entire day doing.
When I am on deadline those breaks are only 5 minutes-- and in those I check my email and that's about it.
Here's a typical DEADLINE week-- as per my dashboard on my iMac
You can see on Monday and Wednesday I start the workday at 10am-- that means I have to get up, have breakfast and walk the dog before 10. On Tuesday I get an earlier start at 9am.
So for example-- my studio needed a good cleaning-- and I wanted to get to it on Sunday but didn't, so I scheduled it for Monday. I had to write a brief plot so splitting the 90mins between that and cleaning seemed to make sense. Getting into it, I realized I needed more time so I scheduled another 90 minutes just to clean-- so from 1030am until 1pm I cleaned the studio.
Took lunch from 1-130 and then worked on assignments all the way until 430 when I left for my WAM class. When I get back I plan on ninety minutes on the heavy bag, shower and then bed. This will lead to Tuesday.
Working this way may seem crazy anal-- I know it would to me if our roles were reversed, but I find this works ridiculously well and eliminates all the "five minute" interruptions that sometimes derail my entire workday.