Devise a routine that works for you. Building habits is huge, and focusing on creating a weekly routine is a great place to start. Involved in three projects? Maybe it makes sense to work on Project A every Monday, Project B every Tuesday, and so on. Or maybe you want to set aside one night a week as your “judge program night,” and hammer out all three projects sequentially.

Two weeks ago, I wrote about how I try to keep track and stay on top of my various commitments. One of the tips I espoused was the following:

I wanted to elaborate on this a bit further, as it’s a principle that I’ve embraced in my own life. Perhaps the best way is to enumerate some of the tasks that I make sure to get done every week or every other week:

Monday: JudgeApps Development Team weekly post

Tuesday: Ask a Judge (Guest Questions)

Wednesday: Bearz Repeating, Finish Ask a Judge

Thursday: N/A

Friday: N/A

This isn’t totally set in stone, but it’s how things have been generally working for the past couple of months. I’ve been especially successful getting into a rhythm with my Ask a Judge column, which has a hard deadline (currently 11:59pm every other Wednesday). The problem with this deadline is that it runs smack into my publication date for Bearz Repeating.

Looking at the schedule up above, it probably makes sense to start setting aside time on Thursdays to write Bearz Repeating. This would avoid the problem of my Wednesdays feeling too crowded and crunched for time. As an added bonus, it might also free me up to start playing Modern on Wednesdays at my local store! (Although I’m not sure I want to deal with all the Eldrazi. ;P )

As much as I like schedules, there are a few projects where my work is more irregular — or, at least, hasn’t yet become tied to a specific day. JudgeApps is a good example of a project where I’d like to establish a more regular rhythm for reviewing code and deploying changes. The challenge is identifying the proper day (or days) for these tasks. (Maybe Mondays, to complement the weekly post I already do then.)

I started a new job about a week and a half ago, so time management has become even more important to me. As I settle into my job, I’m expecting things to be somewhat in flux. With that in mind, another reason I wanted to write this post was to take a kind of public snapshot that I could reference later on. I hope to look back on this post in a few months and see how things have changed!