My original idea that I decided to work on and iterate was a planner and checklist to follow while I am home. I want to create concrete goals for the remainder of the quarantine and increase my daily productivity. After trying to use my planner for the past week, I realized that there were a few things that weren’t working for me.
Firstly, I have found it hard to adjust my sleeping schedule to what my agenda had outlined. My agenda calls for sleeping at 12 AM and waking up at 9:30 AM. I still think that is an ideal sleeping schedule, but certain bad habits and aspects of my quarantine schedule conflict with this plan. For example, one of the only times that I connect with a large group of friends is at night when we play online poker and zoom. While I would like it to start earlier, a lot of times people aren’t able to get on until 11 PM, which means I stay up later than 12 AM a lot of nights. I wish that I could easily just avoid the temptation to stay on the zoom call, but because I miss my friends, it’s hard for me to do so. In the morning, my bad habit of ignoring alarms and sleeping in late has also been a source of struggle for me. To resolve these issues, I decided to make my bedtime and wake-up time a little more flexible ranging from 12 AM-1 AM and 9:30 AM- 10 AM, respectively. I also have made it a rule to turn off my main bedroom light by 10:30 PM to let myself get tired at night, and in the morning, I have made it a rule for myself that I can not use my phone (check texts, go on social media, watch a youtube video, etc) until I go downstairs and start making breakfast. Another rule that I have made for myself is that I can not make coffee after 10:30 AM. I really love coffee, so knowing that I will have to sacrifice it for the day if I don’t get downstairs will definitely help motivate me to get out of bed.
I have also added meditation back into my schedule. I have never been able to put meditation into my daily routine, but I have always believed in the benefits of it. My mom even paid for my brother and I to take lessons in meditation a few years ago, so I feel especially obligated to keep trying. I will do this before breakfast and before dinner for 20 minutes as I had been taught. I hope that this might give me some extra strength, peace, and introspection.
To make sure that I stay on track with starting homework on time, I have added in a new aspect of my schedule which includes Facetiming my boyfriend. He always starts homework pretty early and is done by mid-day, which is my goal. He doesn’t really need anyone to keep him on track, but he’s agreed to Facetime while we do our homework to create a more motivating environment. The point of Facetime isn’t to talk, it’s actually the opposite, both of us are to mute ourselves and talk as little as possible. I have always been a lot better at doing homework with friends because when to take a break, I can have a quick 5-minute conversation instead of getting sucked into my phone or laptop.
The rest of my schedule is pretty much the same as it had been before, but I have added that even when it comes to my free-time activities, I would like to include my friends whenever possible. For example, if I decide that I want to clean my room or organize a certain portion of it, I can ask my friends if any of them need to do the same and we can Facetime to keep each other company. As I mentioned before, I love to work with friends, and that applies to all things, not just homework.
A detail that I changed is that I took Facetime out of my list of activities because I have incorporated it into my schedule in other ways, and I have found that I Facetime people at random times every day and it is not something that I need to plan or schedule. I substituted that activity with the activity of repurposing clothing. I have always really liked to cut up/sew/patch clothing as projects, so that’s something I would like to start again.
Finally, I changed a few things about the format of my schedule. I changed the title from “My Daily Planner” to “Today I get to…” to serve as a reminder of how lucky my family and I are. I am so lucky that some of my greatest concerns right now are what to do with all this time. I also took out the checklist that I planned to use to write down my homework tasks. I realized that I don’t really need to do this because I use my physical planner to write down what I want to accomplish, and using the checklist would mean I would need to print a new one out every day. I didn’t even print it once because I hated the idea of wasting paper. I adjusted this template so that I can print it once and hang it up in my room and not feel as guilty. The last change was that I took out most of the timing checkpoints that were a part of my schedule. I figure that every day my schedule will vary depending on how much homework I have, when my mom makes dinner, etc, so it is more important that I just follow the agenda in order, instead of on time.
With each day I have been able to realize what works for me and what does not. It’s a great way to understand the design process. When I made the prototype, I felt a bit overwhelmed because I knew there were things that I didn’t love about it, but I wasn’t sure how to resolve those issues or even identify some of them. However, after discussing my concept with a few different people and using the prototype, myself, I was able to slowly edit it, one aspect at a time. When I finally sat down to make all the changes to the original, I realized how much better the new design was suited for my daily life. I believe that I could still make future iterations that are superior to this one, and that is what is so exciting about the design process: it is potentially endless. I am thankful for this assignment, because while I do have faith in myself to have possibly made some of these habitual changes eventually, it has definitely expedited and streamlined the effort.
OLD:
NEW:
Leave a Reply