Compartmentalisation and how to use it

Today has been the worst day for my writing practice since I started my daily blog. Usually, I'm going to sleep at around 21:30h. Yesterday, however, I was watching Youtube until one in the morning. After an unrestful night, I started the day by doing the same. This is one of my symptoms of feeling stuck. Often, when I'm feeling stuck I know exactly how to fix it. Usually, what I need to do is uncomfortable, and I start procrastinating on it. It's similar this time.

Starting my daily blog has fulfilled its purpose. I had trouble finishing posts, and I overcame it. Now that this is no longer a problem, I have to think about what I want to do with my blog again. But I don't know what I want to work towards. I also realised that I don't have a good handle on how I spend my time, and neglect many things that are important to me. Last week, however, I read about a possible way out of this. It's called compartmentalisation.

Compartmentalisation means to categorise all your tasks into different areas (or compartments). Instead of thinking in single tasks, where it's easy to loose track, you can use this to think in a few, larger categories.

Let's say you want to start playing music. This creates a lot of questions. What instrument do you want to learn? What genre do you want to play? Do you want to focus on theory, on songwriting, or just start jamming with friends? All these questions are important. But they hide one question you need to answer before you can start to think about them. How much of your time do you want to spend doing music? Compartmentalisation helps to focus on this question by hiding the details that are not yet relevant.

With compartmentalisation, you can create a rough weekly plan by allocating time for each compartment. How much time do you want to spend for your work? For meeting with friends? For reading? For watching Youtube? There's nothing inherently wrong with watching Youtube, but if you do it, do it with intention. Start to track the time you spend in each compartment.

At the end of your week, you now have a much better way to rate your progress. Without compartmentalisation, you might try to rate your week on a scale of 1-10. But what does it mean if you have a 6? How does this score relate to your goals? And how can you improve your next week? With compartmentalisation on the other hand, you immediately see how the different compartments relate to each other. Maybe you made much progress in one area, but neglected another one. Giving an overall score for the week can't represent this. If you use several compartments, it becomes much easier to quickly get a sense of how you are spending your time.