For the last year or more, I’ve been trying to spend time in the evenings working on writing content and creating websites, as well as get fit, cook dinners, do housework, read books and magazines, and a whole lot more. But evenings are very limited – I typically get home from work somewhere between 6 and 7 (sometimes later), and by the time I’ve gotten home and eaten, I have only a short time to spend on getting anything else done before I should be heading to bed and sleeping.

And then, its hard to start something and stop, then to try and pick it up again the next night – so much time is lost in trying to remember where I was up to. The result is that I end up staying up later than I should (and then getting less sleep than I need), and then by the weekend I’m not interested in doing anything except be lazy.

So, now, I’m going to try a new plan. In the week I’ll try and relax in the evenings, and limit the time I spend ‘working’ to about a 30-45 minute task. Then I should be good to spend several hours on Saturday and Sunday to do the bigger things.

One step is to work smarter, and not harder. For example, I find writing is easier if I am doing it in a long session, and so instead of trying to write a blog post two or three evenings a week, I’ll write in long session at the weekend (today, I’ve spent about 2 hours on it) and queue up the posts (I got this idea from my friend John of SixLabRats). That is opposed to the hour or so I’d have spent on each blog post on a weekday evening because of trying to gear up and focus after spending a day at the office (invariably tired because I had been up late the night before trying to get something else done again).

If the experiment is successful, then you should see more content here and at RandomTweak, as well as a new theme at RT next week, and hopefully the Drupal‘d version of HK a couple of weeks after that (with content).

Well, it was probably one of the most dullest ways to spend a week off work, but it was nice and (mostly) relaxing. I didn’t exactly get all I had set out to do either, but hey, it was supposed to be time off.

What I did manage was get out on my bike a couple of times – Ride #1 and Ride #2. I also managed to spend a whole afternoon just chatting with me sister as we wandered up and down the Marion shopping centre, and of course I got to spend time with my niece.

I also started sorting through the collection of data CDs I have stacked on a shelf in my study – most of which is defunct data (like old backups of this site from 5 years ago), or duplicates (like my photo albums, which I’m sorting through and going to place onto a single DVD – oh and post up the choice pictures onto here).

And then there was the reading, and the sorting of the myriad bookmarks, so I have been able to organise a lot of things that I want to write here and on Religious Funny.

Finally, I spent most of the weekend at my parents – helping my Dad with digging up half the garden in order for him to put decking where there was once lawn. Needless to say, I hurt a little now from the hard graft, but I’m surprised that I don’t feel as bad as I thought I would.

So, yeah, back to work today – and it was actually a pretty non-hectic day. Obviously, there was the marathon reading of email, but after that I got back into the swing again today.

Another thing I started doing in the last week was a timeplan in my head – when I’m going to be writing for Horus Kol, Religious Funny and Random Tweak – when I’m going to working on my new Python/Django projects – and when I’m going to doing other things like more drawing, reading, and general relaxing. It goes a bit further than that – I’m starting to think about what I want to be doing in 2010 and beyond already (and we haven’t even got into the last month of 2008 yet). Needless to say, this involves things like buying a home, and travelling more frequently and over more distance again, and getting into shape.

There’s nothing like a week off for getting your head together.