I gave a talk last month at the San Francisco Quantified Self meetup about the time tracking project I’ve been doing over the past 6 years. I would say more, but I don’t want to steal my own thunder.
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Greg, it’s impressive that you’ve been using Excel to track this over 6 years. Questions:
1) Do you think it has been valuable to stick with this? Why?
2) Do you think the frequency of reporting was beneficial, or would more frequent updates be more helpful? (I’m operating under the premise that you were trying to reduce “wasted time” in your leisure category)
3) What would you like your graph to look like in 10 years?
1) Yes, I have a pretty good baseline now so doing this periodically lets me see how things change. Having recently gotten married – the way I spend my time is changing so its nice to see some data – that way if I ever feel like ‘I don’t do X anymore’ I can actually quantify it by saying ‘I spend 20% less time doing X’ – that will also help me see available solutions if any are needed. I’m sure life holds more changes, so its good to be able to return to this.
2) If you mean frequency of doing a tracking week, I feel like once a quarter is a good pace for me. I’m sure it is different for everyone depending on their stage of life. More frequent life changes: new job, new location or new relationship – probably justify more frequent tracking because it is more likely the data will be different. The inverse is probably true as well.
3) This is something I’m actually putting some thought into now. How do I determine how much of my life should be spent doing X & Y. In the past I set my goals off of arbitrary numbers that were largely based on societal norms, but I’m thinking of a way to base that more on myself and how I operate best as a person. Stay tuned for more on this.
Thanks for reading Bryan – hope you guys are doing well.