A few months ago I looked back at my first 30 days of tracking 100% of my time. Now I have about a quarter’s worth of data, and some patterns have emerged.
Looking at the data by project:
- Physiological Needs - 35%
- Online Entertainment - 22%
- Work - 19%
- Hobbies - 12%
- Other - 12%
I think this is broadly in line with what I saw 30 days in. Physiological needs is mostly dominated by sleep, but includes some other “maintenance of the human body” type tasks that need to happen daily, and which slowly add up over time. The key takeaway for me is that, on average, the care and maintenance of my meat chariot is more than a third of my day. And that’s not even particularly good care. That’s darn near the bare minimum. It frustrates me how much time it takes to care for myself, and it’s a number I wish that I could drive lower but know in my heart actually needs to be higher.
The other takeaway is that, at least in the quarter where I was measuring, I spent a lot more time on the various sub-categories of “Online Entertainment” (mostly video games,) than I would have otherwise estimated. I do enjoy video games, I just didn’t think I spent that much time on them.
It’s possible to get a little bit deeper into where exactly that time went, when I look at the description I used to track it. In some cases the description always matches up with the category. Work is always work. In other cases, this is where it becomes possible to disentangle things.
- Sleep - 34%
- Work - 19%
- Computing - 7%
- Travel - 7%
- Fallout 76 - 6%
- WoW - 4%
- Cooking - 3%
- Game - 3%
- Good Eats - 3%
- Errands - 2%
I removed a couple of categories for personal reasons, so you may notice that doesn’t quite add up to 100%. It is, however, the highlights.
Notice that sleep, at 34%, is only 1% shy of the entire physiological needs category. Travel only made it up to 7% because I booked an entire convention under the category. It seemed like the closest and most applicable way to track that time, but for convenience I tracked the whole event that way including time spent eating, sleeping, etc.
This leads me to two actionable conclusions.
- I probably spend a smidge more time gaming than I would ideally want to. As much as I enjoy this, it’s the thing eating the most time from other hobbies.
- All of my mental time budgets that assume I spend 1/3rd of my time “sleeping” fail to account for the rest of the time that it takes to maintain a human body.
My next step, I think, is to retool the categories I’m using to better reflect how I want to spend my day. “Online entertainment” lumps together too many things that I can only usefully split back out by the description on the time record.
Some of the categories I think it might be useful to track include:
- Multiplayer Games
- Singleplayer Games
- Content Creation
- Content Consumption
- Cooking (Hobby)
- Cooking (Sustenance)
I don’t think I’m getting a lot of actionable information out of tracking sleep, although it’s useful for the habit of tracking everything else. Pretty sure there’s a few other categories I never tracked that I’m likely to trash entirely, but it’s good to try the system recommended by others before you start making changes.