The idea is to create an accountability system which will try to keep you in check, balance the input and output of your activities.
- Output activities - this type refers to things that usually produce something, be it learning for university or for yourself, working and maintenance like chores.
- Input activities - activities that revolve around consuming media, mainly entertainment like video games, social media or movies. Reading books as of now is regarded as an output activity since it is considered to improve focus.
Basically, doing output activities produces a resource, named X. Doing input activities consumes it. For example:
By spending 1 hour studying for finals you gain 30 minutes that you can spend on anything from input activities - be it games or movies.
This system is very dependent on self-discipline and time-management, it’s the motion of a habit and you shouldn’t expect to start with 100% precision, you may only strive to get there.
The more advanced idea of the system includes situations where resource gained depends on the subtype of output activity, mostly based on priority in the given time. For example:
- Before finals, spending time studying for university courses will have higher gain than reading a fiction book or hobby programming.
- During times with lots of ‘free’ time, self-development activities will have higher priority than maintenance-type activities.
Such weights should be considered in some timespans, maybe weeks or months but should not be changed too often since too much complexity removes attention from what really matters and wastes time on useless calculations.
Should resource debt occur (at the end of the day Y is negative), it is transferred to the next day. Y surplus does not get transferred however.
There also should be noted that, if need be, there should be allotted quotas for either output or/and input activities. We can’t “farm” free time. We also need to rest in other ways, like sleep, which is not counted in this current iteration of the system.
It maybe is a good idea that instead of spending free time in a single chain of activities, it would be wiser to distribute them into smaller chunks throughout the day. That’s just a theory for now, but from my observation I prefer to have one day free and interchange it with a working day, than have five days of work and 3 continuous days of free time. It needs further observation.