During this past week of using my schedule I have been able to learn a lot about how I can iterate on my design. Overall the schedule has helped me become more productive during the day and feel more motivated to do work. Being able to cross things off my to do list makes me feel proud and accomplished and motivates me to complete more assignments and tasks. Being able to see everything I need to do for the week has made my life more visual which has allowed me to fully realize all the work I need to get done. Seeing it all laid out in front of me creates enough stress in order for me to feel the need to do work. But, with that being said, I find it challenging to motivate myself to start working each day. It was challenging to hold myself accountable to the specific times I allocated in my schedule because there were no real repercussions for not following them. Something I thought of to motivate myself to stay on schedule is to create rewards at the end of each day such as extra freetime or more time to exercise. I have also decided to work on my mindset when going about following my schedule. This past week has been very laid back about following the schedule. If I missed a specific time by five minutes I would think to myself I might as well skip the entire hour. This is a bad mindset to have because I am just letting myself waste more time. In order to work on this I have decided to change my schedule a bit by creating less activities in the day but having each time slot last longer. I think that reducing the amount of times I need to switch activities will allow me to waste less time and be more productive. I have also decided to look at my schedule in a different way. Instead of trying to follow the schedule perfectly I have decided to make it just an outline for my day and allow myself to make variations to the schedule depending on what I need for the day.
I have also realized that working in my room does not provide me with the best environment to be productive. This past week I have been working in my room but one day I randomly decided to work in the dining room. I was able to be more productive and less distracted in the dining room than in my room. I think that this is because it is a space that I can allocate for only work as opposed to a space that I use for all sorts of things. After making this change of where I do my work half way through the week I was able to follow my schedule better because I was less distracted by the things around me. The only problem I have found with working in the dining room is that my dog will come over to me and look at me with those puppy dog eyes saying “Come play with me!” This distraction was not in my room because I was able to close my door but it is now hard for me to resist because I love playing with my dog. In order to reduce this problem I plan to set aside time each morning before I start my work to play with my dog. This will hopefully make her tired so that she will not distract me once I start my work.
In order to push this idea further, I plan to incorporate journaling into my day. After speaking with the class, I realized that a lot of my classmates really enjoyed their time journaling during this time. I hope to be journal each day and create a little story of my life that I could look back on and remember this crazy time in our lives. I think that journaling will also help me bring some sort of calm thinking into my life. Being able to reflect on each day whether it be my accomplishment or my struggles will help me to stay positive and motivated during this time. Journaling may even allow me to come up with new ideas to do during quarantine or help me explore previous ideas and innovate on them.
Overall my experience with the design process has been rewarding. It has helped me become more productive in my house and has taught me some interesting things about the ways in which I work productively. I hope to be able to find a project to do creatively such as embroidering or painting. This will hopefully give me motivation to do my school work so that I can finish and work on something that I love to do. I plan to look back on the beginning of this process and get inspiration from all the opportunities I laid out for myself when we came up with 50 ideas. I plan to incorporate more of them into my everyday schedule and keep working to make my time at home more enjoyable.
Leave a Reply