Managing time is a problem for most people, regardless of their livelihood. However, as any small business owner can tell you, when you are responsible not only for achieving the goals laid out but for deciding what those goals should be, time management becomes increasingly complex. We have certainly found that to be so on our little smallholding.

Over the first few years of living here we tried a number of different ways to manage our time, with more or less success depending on the system.Primarily my time, as I am the person who works full time on our smallholding. However, through constant experimentation and refinement of your system we have hit upon a method that works for us. While it might not be perfect for you and your situation, I think it might be of interest to others in planning out how they want to divide up their days. This is the current state of our Time / Project / Work management system.

Time Slots

The first, and most important thing for us was to create a rhythm to the day. To do this we divided up our time into five rough chunks: Early Morning, Morning, Lunch, Afternoon, and Evening. Lunch is the axis of our day, around which everything else revolves. Raquel goes to work, the kids come home from school, the sun hits its zenith… With three of these time slots (Early Morning, Lunch, and Evening) pretty much the same from day to day, we were left with Morning and Afternoon as potential work times.

We decided to assign heavy farm work to the morning slot and “domestic” work to the afternoon slot.In permaculture terms, what we have done is to assign every single afternoon to working in Zones 0 and 1. Morning are rotated through Zones 2 through 5 We did this because our off-farm schedule allowed for two adults to be available for heavy lifting in the mornings, and the kids would be around for lighter work they could help with such as watering potted plants. This allows them to feel involved and accomplished in a way that watching me dig post holes for fences never would.

Organization

With a general rhythm to the day figured out, we then divided our physical locations up into seven general locations or types, giving us a focus for each day of the week, and more importantly, something of a guarantee that each area of the place would receive attention on a weekly basis. By doing this, the stress of feeling behind on half a dozen projects while trying to accomplish one thing pretty much disappears.

In this way, we rotate through our gardens, fields, orchards, animal pens, pastures, village lanes and hedges, wood sheds, making sure everything is making some small progress each week.

Record Keeping

We endeavor to, and sometimes achieve, keeping daily records of all of our work around the place. I find this activity very calming, in that it is a direct reproach to the part of my brain that likes to tell me that because not everything on every list I have ever made is accomplished that I have done nothing, and never will. Sure, it also has some value in being a way to find out when I last had to replace a machine part or calculate how much fuel I am buying for small engines, but its primary purpose is firmly within the mental health realm.

To do our record keeping we use the excellent Obsidian markdown editor. Since I already was using it to do all of my writing on this website, Eating Asturias, and all of my other projects, as well as using it as a personal notebook, it made sense to use it for our smallholding records as well. Our records take the form of a single text file per week, divided into Morning and Evening sections for each day. Within those sections there are spaces for recording the weather, what we did, and what we want to do next (Next Actions in time-management jargon).

Inspiration

We have drawn from various sources to develop this system, and I would like to recognize the most significant here.

• Helen and Scott Nearing have (as in so many other things) been an inspiration. Chapter 2, “Our Design For Living”, of their book Living the Good Life gave us the concepts of dividing our projects into Fair and Foul weather, and of dividing the work day into two sections split by lunch.
• From David Allen’s Getting Things Done we have taken the idea of Contexts and of having a Next Action in each context. This has been instrumental in how we mentally divide up our physical space around the place.
• The concept of a Daily Activity Log (or diary if you’re old fashioned) is as old as writing, and we make significant use of it, not only as a way to know when we last worked on a thing, but as a way to be able to look back at our week and see our accomplishments written out. Very motivating.