Did I mention I was a middle-manager?

It would be a lie if I tried to give you a sound reason for this exercise. I cannot really answer it. All I can say, for context, was that three months ago I began tracking the top six activities that I thought I should complete everyday. If I did anyone of these activities for more than one hour on a given day (excluding making a diary entry) I would get an ´X´ for completed on my daily tracker.

You could argue that the Rule of One Hour is a weak measure. How does doing any of these things for at least one hour actually add up to or even produce a desired result? Well, feel free to reflect on that one yourself. When I started to question the validity in the Rule of One Hour the only conclusion I could make was that this has gone far enough, I am incapable of refining this process and its feeble methodology any further.

Now three months deep I have got some data and I have got graphs.

Graph One

The first graph I made was a bust. Or as Sarah said, "A waste of time." I wanted to see if there was a general pattern to my month; was I doing more/less/the same thing during the first/second/third/forth week of a month?

The below information reflects all activities completed every day over the course of April, May and June. There appears to be little or no trend. The only thing I could establish from this information was that May and June started well and trended down while April started low and finished more productively.

Graph Two

The second thing I wanted to establish was which activity was favoured over others. Below we can see that reading has taken the lead by a country mile. Not surprisingly the next highest activity was completing a diary entry (i.e. is not subject to the Rule of One Hour and therefore is a less onerous task).

All other activities have been completed consistently though with less frequency. It should be noted that volunteering started half way through April and D.W.E. did not begin until June. It is also notable that May was conspicuously less productive though the trend is generally the same. The lack of productivity in May relates to the time taken out to travel to La Paz to see Hester off.


Graph Three

My favourite discovery so far is through the Overall Productivity Per Day of the week graph. With the exception of May which (as explained above) has been an irregular month April and June clearly show us that there may be some truth in that myth about the middle of the week. As far as Executives are concerned the best day is Tuesday.

I must say that while I am not working nine-to-five I am happily amused with the approximate correlation. The other thing this graph reflects is that there are no "dead" days. When it comes to picking my own schedule and choice of daily activities it appears that any-day and every-day is a good time to being "working" on something; TGIF does not exist in this current lifestyle.

Graph Four

The fourth graph is nice and simple. May is shown clearly as a weak month while April and June reflect that I am consistant with struggling to obtain a perfect score of 186/186 (April/May) and 217/217 (June; +31 for actovoty of D.W.E.) with April being my first - and by far - best month overall.

In terms of percentages that means that in April I completed 158/170 (92.94%), May 106/170 (62.35%) and 170/217 (78.34%) in June.


Conlcusion

It is clear that I have found it diffcult to stay motivated to complete all acitivites everyday. If you were my boss, and given that I have choosen all these activites myself, I think it would be fair to challenge me on this. Why should I be kept on if I am not completing jobs as agreed? Has an agreement not been made here?

Motivationally it should be said that there has been "good", clear, performance in some areas (reading and writing my diary). To develop in the next quarter there is much improvement needed in the areas of studying spanish, volunteering, exercising, D.W.E. and writing.

More generally it appears that - despite having an alternative lifestlye currently - there is still a trend through the middle-days of the week where my performce peaks like any other middleclass person. Contrary to this is the fact that I will still produce on Saturdays and Sundays when Monday-Friday type activities are usually in hiatus in a standard nine-to-five type lifestyle.