In a chain of blog posts I had a pretty profound revelation about how I spend my time.

Tim Smith at Bright Pixels linking to David Sparks at Macsparky writing about block scheduling led me to look at my own calendar.

I work in a warehouse shipping electronics to customers. I don’t have the luxury of scheduling my work day like the creative people that I like to read online. There are hard deadlines for orders to ship through out the work day and I have to focus on those deadlines rather than carving time out to think about what to write about. That time that I can use is in the morning before my shift starts.

If I wake up at 9 am every day and leave for work at 1 pm every day; I will have 4 hours during the day to schedule my own stuff. That’s twenty (20) hours a week that I have available to me to work on projects, goals, tasks, whatever. Twenty hours.

Right now I spend the majority of those four hours a day sitting on the couch drinking coffee and reading RSS feeds while YouTube plays music videos on my TV. That is a waste of time. I am not using my time effectively. I am wasting my time.

What am I going to do about it? I don’t know yet. But, just realizing that I have 20 hours in the week to do what I want to do is a sudden eye opener for me. I have never stopped to think about how much time I am wasting every day.