I’ve spent the last several weeks using Toggl to track 100% of my time, and the results have been interesting.
Reasoning
On a flight to who knows where I read Use Strategic Thinking to Create the Life You Want and thought it had some interesting ideas to try, one of which was to rate certain areas of my life on a matrix of how important it was to me and how much time I spent on it.
There are some areas of my life that I don’t think I spend enough time on, but my intuitive sense is that my time is mostly well-managed given that I only have 24 hours a day to work with. It seemed like an interesting experiment to try tracking 100% of my time for a while to see how well it lined up with my subjective experience.
Methodology
In the article they talk about “Strategic Life Units” (SLU) as the sixteen key areas where people spend their time. I set up a new Toggl workspace following that outline with six “Strategic Life Areas” (Relationships, Body Mind Spirit, Community, Profession, Interests, and Personal Care,) as clients assigned to the SLUs as projects.
My list of SLUs (plus, where applicable, examples):
- Mental Health
- Physical Health - Exercise, but also going to the doctor.
- Spiritual Health
- Community - Local clubs, civic engagement. If elections were going on, I’d put them here.
- Society - Volunteering, activism.
- Hobbies
- Offline Entertainment - Going to a show or movie. Reading a book. Non-interactive entertainment. Touching grass.
- Online Entertainment - Video games, streaming, general-purpose computing.
- Daily Life - Errands, groceries.
- Physiological Needs - Sleep, care of the meat chariot in which my brain resides.
- Education
- Finances
- Work
- Family
- Friendship
- Significant Other
Where an activity could plausibly fit under two categories, I tried to pick the category where it fit “best” and then be consistent about it. For example, a meal which I ate alone would fall under “Physiological Needs,” but a meal eaten with friends would fall under “Friendship.”
Results
Aggregated over the last four weeks the majority of my time falls into one of four categories. The big winners, in order:
- 40% Physiological Needs
- 27% Online Entertainment
- 17% Work
- 6% Hobbies
The remaining 10% is split between a few different things, with Significant Other and Daily Life leading the pack at around 3.7% each.
So how do I feel about that?
Physiological Needs feels about right, since I used it to track (among other things) the time I was sleeping. And I sleep a lot. I always have. Being well rested is a super power and the older I get the more certain I am that time spent sleeping is time well spent.
But I was shocked to see how much time I spend on Online Entertainment. Now, granted, this might be a particularly unusual period. Two different four-day weekends fell during this period. Even still, looking at an average work day, it’s the most likely thing to fill in the majority of the time between work and sleep.
Work seems basically fine, again considering the number of PTO days that fell in the sample period.
Hobbies is… Abysmal. Of that 6%, the majority was actually time spent cooking. Now I happen to think, for me, it’s fair and accurate to count cooking time as hobby time. I absolutely love to do it. And the only reason there wasn’t more of it is that I fast more days of the week than not. On days where I was planning to eat, cooking usually accounted for at least a few hours. It’s time well spent. But all of my other hobbies (of which, honestly, there are too many,) are generally languishing.
Next Steps
I would like to see Online Entertainment come down. The four biggest sources contributing to Online Entertainment during this time were:
- “Game” - Basically playing some game. This does make sense given the Steam Sale, and might be unusually high given my PTO.
- “Computing” - My catch-all category for time spent “farting around” on a computer. This could be social chatting, it could be reading RSS.
- “WoW” - Specifically playing World of Warcraft.
- “Good Eats” - Rewatching the TV show Good Eats, which I enjoy especially mid-fast when all I want to do is plan my next meal.
I enjoy gaming, and I think it could rightly be tracked as hobby instead, so I think I’m going to monitor it for another few weeks and see if it stays as high as it has. Not yet concerned.
“Computing” is, generally speaking, not time well spent. There’s some important stuff that gets lumped in there mostly because I forget to update Toggl, but I think driving that down is a worthy goal.
World of Warcraft is, at this point, more of a social opportunity than a game. There was an event running during part of the sample period that I think lead to more than the usual amount of playing, so I do want to keep an eye on that, but also there’s a new expansion due towards the end of the summer that would drive this back up. The important thing to me is to not spend “idle time” in WoW, and I almost never do that.
Good Eats and the watching of streaming in general is not awful, and I suspect less than what would be considered “average,” but I would prefer to spend at least some of that time working on hobbies instead. No concrete plans there, but something to keep in mind.
What do I want to see more of? Friendship, Significant Other, and Hobbies.
In an average month I see friends in the real world approximately once. I don’t know many people who live near me, because I moved to the middle of nowhere during the pandemic. I do like living here, but I wish I had more social connections that didn’t require a flight. I’ve also slowly become awful at maintaining my digital friendships, and I likely need to do something about that.
My SO and I live together, and do a lot together, and I think that’s mostly getting lumped into other categories out of convenience. It’d be nice to be more intentional about that.
Entire swathes of my hobbies have been ignored for truly worrying amounts of time. I haven’t run a TTRPG campaign in going on three years now, and the last time I worked on my Warhammer armies was probably March.
Summary
Tracking 100% of my time for a few weeks was really eye-opening. I “waste” more time than I would have guessed, and it seems like I should be able to come up with some systems to help me be better about that. But there are also places where I’m right on track, and if nothing else it’s nice to know where those are.