Autonomy Generally speaking, I think everyone agree that we'd all like to have more free time. In modern society it seems that demands of work, family and social commitments leave little or no time for us to really feel we have the freedom to do whatever we want.

With my recent reduction in working hours, I've now been given this opportunity.

It's been about 4 weeks now, and for the most part I've been pretty busy, running errands, enjoying lunches with my wife, relaxing, but today, I'm sitting here feeling a certain level of angst.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining! But, I'll be honest, I'm struggling, not with BOREDOM, but with having to make a DECISION of HOW to spend my time...

There's no rule book to look to which can tell me, of the 3 1/2 hours that sit between me and when my oldest son gets home from school, how they should be carved up and used or spent, or invested, or wasted.

Do I...
...hop on my bike and go for a ride?
...go for a run, training for my 1/2 marathon
...do some housework
...read a book
...learn some new technical skills
...surf facebook
...play video games

I could do any or a few of, or all of these things, and I could probably come up with justifications as to why they were the best choice, and perhaps the choice isn't even the point of this post.

I'm just trying to express that HAVING to make that decision isn't insignificant, I know it's as a result my thinking too much, this is something I need to do a bit, not put so much pressure on myself to always make the best, most productive use of my time.

Anyhow, I think I will go for a bike ride, take a long my book and my laptop, do some reading and e-learning, have lunch and then head back.

Question to ponder - how should one develop one's own guidelines of how to spend one's time? What should be a reasonable ratio of time spent on fun, personal development, exercise, housework? I get that everyone's answer would be different, but what would a strategy be to rank a person's own priorities and then organize the time accordingly.  ¶ 11:02 AM 0 comments

  Resurrection I haven't been posting to my blogs for a long time. There isn't a single reason, it's a combination of (a) being busy with work during the day and other activities when not working, (b) increased usage of Facebook, leading me to either summarize my thoughts in a status update, or post them via a Facebook note, and (c) Using Google Reader's 'Share' feature, making it easy to pass along an interesting article.

Since February of this year (2008), I've moved from full-time to part-time with my main client, so I now find myself with more free time, so I'm definitely going to start blogging more, I think I'll be concentrating on technology, and my other interests like positive psychology, transhumanism, and fitness.

I've just registered a few new domain names - www.askjohn.ca and www.walterfamily.ca - I'll be setting up web sites shortly. I'm using www.GoDaddy.com for domain registration and hosting. They're a HUGE hosting company, offer very competitive pricing, they advertised heavily on DIGGnation, a video podcast I used to watch, so I figured I'd use them, so far so good.

As opposed to starting to code my sites from scratch, I'm going in a more up-to-date direction, planning to use Drupal, a content management system (cms), I think this is definitely the direction to go for most web sites these days, unless they call for some very unique features/functionality.

So, stay tuned as I develop and launch my latest web presence, I hope to provide some useful streams of memes for my friends and anyone else who shares my interests.  ¶ 9:52 PM 0 comments