Kuan

January 16, 2023

My typical "working" day

8 hours of sleep later, I usually wake up to a bright day. The lazy morning routine kicks in:

1. continue laying in the bed for half hour.
2. get up to do neck and shoulder stretching.
3. Cold shower. Brush.
4. To the kitchen now. Drink 300ml plain water.
5. Put back all the dried dishes from the drying rack.
6. Back to the room. Make the bed.
7. Kitchen again. Brew a hand drip coffee.

Without too many surprises, this routine usually takes 1.5 hours. With coffee ready, now I can decide my next 1.5 hour activities, the options are:

1. Work. (this means I have a time sensitive task at hand)
2. Check in workspaces for messages from the boss and team. Plan the tasks for the day. Mindless browsing. Chit-chat with online people.
3. Play my switch. (Either because I bought a new game, or I am at some crucial turns in Civilization VI).

Bee, my wife, and I usually sip the coffee in the kitchen, or on the low table in the living room when the day is cool. As the day approaches the midday, we will start working on the lunch. The usual simple home cook lunch routine as follows:

1. Prepare: Bee will decide what to cook and the ingredients. I wash and cut them.
2. Cook: Bee cooks. I, either continue cutting or start washing.
3. Eat.
4. Wash: Me.

The whole thing usually takes 2 hours. Or 2.5 hours if the lunch is a slightly complicated one. Home cook is healthy, simple and money saving. But it is NOT time saving.

Lunch is over. Real work starts. If we work up early and energetic, usually the clock is 12 o'clock. Connect my laptop to the 24" monitor, my beloved Ducky keyboard, good old Logitech Mouse, standing in front of them and start typing.

After more than one decade of finding and fine-tuning my productivity. I reduced to three main methods:

1. I use pomodoro as my working rhythm. 35 minutes of focused work followed by a 10-minute break.
2. I use a simple .txt for all my current and upcoming tasks.
3. I use taskwarrior and timewarrior to track my hours.

The tracking of work hours is not only for the paid work. I have started tracking my work hours before I start my freelancing. They are for the fine tune. The ability to filter and correctly report my paid hours is a nice bonus I earned from this discipline. Below is my "mission control":

mission control.png


What do I do during those 10 minutes break? House works, mostly. Sweep one section of the house, wash one section of the bathroom, vacuum, mop the floor, etc. 

4:30 p.m. is usually the timing we need to slow down and worry about the dinner. The routine will be similar to lunch, but this time include a shower. Prepare, bath, cook, eat, wash. 2~3 hours.

Then, the day is dark, the night has come. Early dinner means there are still a handful of hours left before bedtime. We still start the night with another round of hand drip coffee. Here are the options I have:

1. Work with music. Put on my BOSE and fire up Spotify/YouTube, continue work. These are usually my best work hours.
2. Work with Starcraft 2 tournament replay. Half working and half watching starcraft matches. Usually my worst work hours. Reserved for mindless tasks only.
3. Netflix! This is when Bee does not want to work that night.

10 p.m. is usually the bedroom and books timing. Finally, sleep by 12. 

About Kuan

Web developer building with Flutter, Svelte and JavaScript. Recently fell in love with functional programming.

Malaysian. Proud Sabahan. Ex game developer but still like playing games.

New found hobby is outdoor camping with my love.