STEP 3

Every day, we balance our time between essential activities and choice activities. Essential activities include: sleep, breaks, hygiene & grooming, preparing food & drinks, eating & drinking, cleaning up the kitchen, and all other essential tasks that you have to perform yourself (that you cannot delegate to anybody else) and that have to be performed daily no matter if it’s a weekday, a Saturday, or a Sunday.

All other activities, in between, are considered to be choice activities such as: exercising, running errands, grocery shopping, spending time with your people, working, volunteering, playing (leisure time), screen time, etc.

To complete STEP 3, you will use the Daily ACTIVITIES Journal worksheet to log how much time you spend on choice activities for a whole week (for 7 consecutive days).

Before you start, make sure you pick a week that you predict will be as close to your typical as possible. Also, make sure that if you’re sick (if you have a cold, the flu, or other) you wait until you’re back to your regular self before you embark on this logging journey.

Once you start, make sure there are at least a couple of days during the week where you push yourself to your mental and physical limits. Then, make sure there are at least of couple of days where you are very gentle on yourself, where you operate at a much slower and relaxed pace. For the remaining days in between, I suggest you work at a moderate pace, at a pace that is comfortable to you.

When you’re documenting all of your choice activities in your daily journals, this week, I suggest you make your entries as detailed as possible so that later you will be able to count your “spoons” using the MENTAL & PHYSICAL SPOONS Equivalents Charts.

For example, it would be better for you to enter “answer emails” instead of just “work”, or “play cards with the kids” instead of just “play with the kids”, since certain activities require more or less “spoons” to perform than others.

To help you determine how many minutes you spend on each activity, you can use a stopwatch, or you can write the start and end times for every activity.

If you don’t want to carry your worksheet around with you all day, I suggest you use a memo pad (paper or digital) to note everything down. If you use this method, of course, at the end of the day, you will have to transcribe everything onto your daily worksheet.

When logging tasks that are done simultaneously (2 at a time), I suggest you write them down on the same line in your journal. This will help you later count the number of times per day you operate in multitask mode.

Finally, at the end of each day, you will score yourself with regards to how well you functioned mentally and physically throughout the day. You will give yourself a score of four (4) if you were fully functional all through the day. You will give yourself a score of three (3) if you were a bit diminished. You will give yourself a score of two (2) if you were clearly diminished. And you will give yourself a score of one (1) if you were mostly dysfunctional throughout the day.