A reader of my blog was asking what I have been doing lately. Well, not much has changed since I last wrote about my daily routine a few months ago. I rarely do anything much on a day to day basis. Time just passes away! I am not being lazy, but neither am I doing anything productive. Anyway, after seeing the comment, I decided to record my daily routine for a couple of days and post it so you have some idea. But of course everyday is different. There is no set routine. I just do what I like to do most of the times.


Day 1

Time Work
5:15 - 8:00 morning rituals, coffee, bug fixing, news, emails
8:00 - 10:30 kid time, breakfast, youtube, sun time, family time
10:30 - 3:00 gym, lunch, movie, news, karate planning, youtube
3:00 - 5:00 cleaning, fix laptop power usage issue, guitar
5:00 - 7:45 kid time, movie, kid time
7:45 - 9:15 dinner, youtube, amazon search, sleep


Day 2

Time Work
5:45 - 8:00 morning rituals, coffee, emails, amazon search continues
8:00 - 10:00 kid time, breakfast, youtube, sun time
10:00 - 1:00 gym, news, issue with obsidian [1], lunch, family time
1:00 - 4:30 friend visit, movie, blog post draft, family time
4:30 - 7:45 movie, issue with minecraft [2], guitar, kid time
7:45 - 9:15 dinner, family time, youtube, sleep

[1] https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/578970

[2] https://github.com/Wyze3306/BedrockOnLinux/issues/260


I am not exaggerating. Most days go like that for me. On the days my daughter does not go to school (she does not attend school all 5 days in case you did not already know that), I spend a lot more time with her. Some days I have karate instead of gym. Some other days I do house cleaning like mopping floor, cleaning windows, etc instead of gym or karate.


One interesting thing which I noticed lately is that I am enjoying life more than usual :). I am barely writing any code these days. If you look at my git commits, you will notice that my code check-ins have reduced quite a bit in the last 6 months.


I have been mostly playing some old computer games (like Starcraft, Age of Empires etc) or watching movies / TV shows. Oh, that brings up a good point. When searching for the greatest TV shows of all time, I routinely found that “Breaking Bad” used to top the list on most websites. I did not understand why. I never watched the series. In fact we rarely watch any TV shows other than American sit-coms like Friends, Office Space, Big Bang Theory, Simpsons etc. I thought we should understand why this particular show gets top spot.


We started binge watching it and there goes all my productive time. Anyway, we finally finished watching it. We didn’t like it much but the acting, videography and production quality, was was top notch. However, it was too dark for our liking. We heard that “Better Call Saul” may be better (coming from the same director) and so, now we are binge watching that :).


In between, we had a 3 weeks vacation and as you can imagine, I did not work on any project at all during that time. That also was one of the reason for such low code commits.


Other than those that I already mentioned, we have some friend visits etc. Some times I spend a lot of time with them discussing random subjects. Most recently I met a friend who also retired and we just discussed random subjects about life after retirement, AI, kids, movies, stock market etc. Half the day just went away like that. Another time I had to teach our friend’s kid how to do soldering, some basic electronics, a tour of my electronics and home automation etc. That took another half day. Things like these happen and I don’t do much work.


I teach a little bit of karate in the karate school where I learn. So I am both a teacher and a learner now that I am a black belt. The school which my daughter attends invited me to teach karate for 3-4 months, just as an introductory course. So I used to teach a class there as well. The whole school including some teachers (who were also learning), showcased their skills in the school’s sports day. That is something!


So if you ask me what I do on a daily basis, then my answer is a clear “not much” and yet I am not sure where all the time goes! The important thing is that I don’t mind this kind of life at all. Some people hate me for wasting so much time and not doing anything productive for the betterment of society in general. All I say is, I don’t care :).


The whole point of retiring early was so that I can work on things that interest me at the time that I like. I am not tied to any deadlines and never feel anything is urgent except for the current moment that I am experiencing. I don’t need more of anything. Just want to chill with what I have and enjoy a simple life.