Nightly routine

There was a time when your nightly routine about maxed out with brushing your teeth, now it seems the nightly routine has developed into a fine art form. It’s one side of working for myself coupled with the industry I live in I guess. You may sort your emails, you may set your calendar, organise your feeds, back up your hard drive – we all have our own routine we do before ‘puter off time’ or ‘brain off time’.

My routine

My nightly routine has evolved into about 30 minutes of time which is my organisation time. I thought it may be good to write down my current nightly routine. Often this is my night routine when work ends not when the puter goes off – I like to be half awake to do this as it’s pretty crucial for me. I am going to follow this with a morning and weekly routine posts I think as a sort of documenting. I’m really interested in ways I can save myself brain leaking and time so I’m always looking to improve my own routine.

• Back up:

  I do a nightly back up to my hard drive of clients, designs and other files. I try and keep it to what I’ve actually used but often it’s a straight dump that I delete the next day before doing the back up. I leave this running while I get on with the rest of my routine.

• Flag important emails to action the next day:

  I do this when they come in but incase I was busy I double check to make sure nothing has slipped. This often feeds into my iCal phase. I only do a total email clear down once a week as find overkill to do every day.

• Check Studiometry and update the project or projects worked on that day:

  I use this to project manage logical binary and it works pretty well. In here I can also raise to do lists which again feeds into my iCal phase. I check any invoices are due along with write up notes if I have any in my moleskin with regards to projects. I try and capture notes in studiometry as they happen but it’s not a perfect process as I still seem to use my moleskin for meeting note taking (I am an obsessive note taker during any meeting) and random thoughts relating to projects.

• Organise my iCal:

  This is done using a mixture of brain dumping, mail sorting, syncing with studiometry (the one issue I have with this is that it dumps into one calendar so I then have to dish them out into day or week to do calendars. meetings, accounts and so on – I’m sure there is a work around for this but not found it yet) and taking noted tasks / appointments from my moleskin and into iCal. The way I have my to do lists set up in iCal is pretty basic but it works currently, I have a calendar for ‘today’ and ‘week’ to do lists. This way I can work through the day without having to recall what on earth I am meant to be doing.

• Clear down my desktop:

  I have this really annoying habit of just plonking things on the desktop all day. To get around this in not such a time saving manner I spend a few minutes at the end of the day sorting into the main folders I have for clients and designs in progress. I do have a unsorted folder that gets cleared down once a week and is my ‘erm where does this go’ dumping ground.

• Flag feeds:

  Now, I often do this throughout the day and use Newsfire for a feed reader so flagging is nice and easy – I am trying to limit the amount of ‘on time’ my feed reader gets though. I am also going through a bit of a feed weeding process at the moment as it got out of hand a short while ago.

• Idea dump:

  Sometimes in the day I’ll have an idea for a post, for something design wise, something for one of my longer term to do lists or lists of ideas (yes I do like lists and omnioutliner is my friend) – whatever the dump is it goes in my moleskin as the day goes on. At the end of the day I will assign it to a digital place. Often these are if blog posts put in MarsEdit as drafts – occasionally they evolve from drafts to almost full posts (this one did that) which I review in the morning or post then if they are done. This is one reason it’s put to the last thing as I can tend to start on things at this time such as writing the blog post or doing the design. If it’s a design it will usually be left for the end of the week moleskin dump I have in place.

Things I’d like to add to my routine.

As I said I’m always reviewing my processes and lately one thing that has started bugging me is the amount of links I plonk in my ‘sketchbook’ bookmark. This has a similar place in my life to my unsorted folder. I seem to plonk anything I find interesting in that to the point it’s becoming seriously in need of a diet. My ‘plan’ to resolve this is to start up with del.icio.us more and assign these to the del.icio.us tags – I use Cocoalicious so it would work out well as a more organised reference aswell as being able to then use online anywhere. I’m not sure if this is a weekly or daily task though so that will remain to be seen. My rule between the two is often how long it takes to do after leaving for a week – too long it becomes daily.

The only flaw with this plan is the huge over weight list – I have to spend some time sorting it before I am going to be able to start this process. It is assigned to my next day off list (yes I do have one in omnioutliner) and will be dealt with then, it’s more the ‘next day off’ when I have time to do this that is resulting in the over weight ‘next day off list’…. You may be starting to see the problem of letting something slip for a while then realising you did and having to organise it… Nobody told me organisation would be so hard to well erm organise.

Overkill?

For me, this isn’t overkill. Using this method I have managed to free up a fair bit of mental space and also avoided missing meetings and other things. I am much more able to manage my time and work out if I am being realistic about things. I am able to see problems often before they arise which is priceless for me. I also find acting on ideas or at least dumping them in this way really helps me to build on or even focus on and sort things that would often get lost in endless moleskins or brain cells.

There you have it though that is my nightly routine. So, what is yours before you turn your computer / brain off?