Confession – I love sleeping! Who am I kidding, if I could sleep for 14 hours a day, I would – I truly love to sleep. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a lazy person, I’m what you would call a slow starter – for me, waking up in the morning was always a big issue. When I was younger (early 20s), my dad would comment – “if you would have been paid to sleep, you’d be a millionaire”. And that was so true, I had a good job in a start-up company, I was traveling the world – and yet, sleeping was always my favorite thing.

Time passed on (20 years to be more exact) and I became a CEO of my company and father to 2 amazing daughters. One thing that kids taught me: from this point onward, sleeping is a luxury. I remember that my wife and I joyed as our young one started sleeping full nights, suddenly, we had our proper nights sleep back to us. And indeed, quickly I tried resuming my old sleeping habits – I still like to snooze the morning off during the weekend.

About 2 weeks ago, shortly after turning 40, I’ve realized something fairly scary – I’m wasting much of my time sleeping, there is so much more to do. So, amazingly enough, I started going to the office at the early hour of 6:30AM. Amazingly enough, no traffic, so I reach my office at around 7AM. Suddenly I discovered: “Wait a minute, I have more time – I need to plan it better”. So, I sat down with a pen and paper, and wrote a list of bullets points that I would like to cover on a daily basis. This was the list I made:

  • Open Source Projects: PHPARI Coding, Asterisk Lab, Kamailio Lab
  • Tech Studies: PaaS platforms, Openstack, Android Development
  • General Administration: Accounting, Price Quotes, Billing, etc
  • Actual Work: Write code, Write Spec documents, etc.

I shortly realized: “That’s a bloody long list, impossible to cover all of it in one day – so focus”. So, I decided to split my day among the passions, not the subjects. So, now my day looks like this:

  • 2 Hours – Open Projects related (every day something different)
  • 2 Hours – General Administration and shit
  • 1 Hour –  Daily catch up with the guys
  • 1 Hour – Learn something new (every day something different)
  • 30 Minutes – Lunch
  • 5 Hours – Actual Work

Yes, it’s a very busy schedule – but what I’ve learned is that if I start early, I’m able to push more into the day – my evening becomes more relaxed. I even end up with enough time to sit down and write a blog post about how I optimized my time.

I’m dying to know, out of the readers of my blog, I’d love to read about your schedule – what are able to accomplish in one day of work?