rescheduling my week
I’ve rescheduled my week. I’ve grouped together the days that I teach yoga and moved my day of building wheels at Racer Rosa from Wednesday to Sunday. It may seem like a small change but it has made me relax and will actually be a significant change to the way that I do things in general.
So far this year (2012) I have had my week much the same as it has been during the past year and that was fine as I was used to it but since my course began with Berkeley I suddenly found that I had hardly any time. I wanted to give as much time as I could to it but having taken on lots of wheel orders and a couple of website projects I just couldn’t see how I could go on without having to drop something.
I had been vaguely thinking about certain changes but hadn’t really thought about my week as a whole until I explained my situation to a friend who immediately saw where the time was getting eaten up. It was the wheels. I love to do the wheel work and fail to see that it is quite a lot of work for very little money. This doesn’t bother me too much. But for someone who doesn’t understand that love of the craft it was easy to see that I was wasting my time especially when I needed to direct it toward a new love. I was telling her that I was planning to go to Racer Rosa to build wheels for a whole day with 3 hours commuting time and in the same breath I was complaining about having little time to study. It was obvious when she reflected it back to me.
It also occurred to me how to go about re-arranging my week so that I can group my activities together and have longer periods or even whole days doing the same thing.
What I’ve changed
I’ve put a notice on my wheel site that I’m no longer doing repairs to damaged wheels and have told Diego (at Racer Rosa Bicycles) that I will go there on Sundays. I’m already in town on Sundays so I can go up to Walthamstow in the afternoon and then have the Wednesday free. I’ve also asked Alice (my Monday evening private yoga client) to move to Tuesday, which she can do so that I have two classes on the same day rather than split up. It will mean a big gap of 3 and a half hours on Tuesday afternoons but that I will mean that I have the whole day on Monday. It means that I will have only three days a week when I need to commute into town. I can go for proper cycle rides rather than getting mileage by commuting.
The main changes will be that the week will be less scattered. My initial idea was to drop a yoga class in order to gain the extra time but that would have meant a big loss in income. But instead I have lost some mileage. If I use only commuting mileage then it will be halved but at least I will keep my regular income. I have become very fed up with teaching yoga but it pays the most for the least amount of work as opposed to building wheels. Now, rather than doing a bit of everything each day I will do one or perhaps two main things and hopefully stay focused on that thing.