I studied programming for 13 hours. Week 5. Anti-productivity
I’m sure that using the time tracker helps me significantly in learning. Every time I press the tracker button, I work in a focused and efficient way. Tracking allows me to keep track of weekly/monthly/yearly reports, I’ve definitely started to learn more because of it. But there is one problem, lately my pace is not stable and has dropped twice.
The question is, where did the hours go? I understand that I was tired and took a break… But where exactly are the lost hours went to? Wouldn’t it be fun to know how much time I’ve been messing around and what exactly did I do? I believe that if I pay attention to such things, I can turn a couple of inefficient hours into beneficial time.
But how do you track inefficient time? I’m not going to time every activity. Anyway, for the past week I’ve been trying a new time tracking program. It accounts all the activity on the computer: usage of application, variety of sites you spend time on, google calendar meetings, etc. Considering that I’m almost always at the computer, the accounting is pretty accurate. It was an interesting experiment. And I was really freaked out about how much time I was wasting. I watched YouTube for 26 hours. I thought I was watching useful videos about IT, job interviews and other wholesome stuff. But no, I sorted out that these were 26 hours of entertaining content. Six hours of gaming, couple hours of social networks and twitch. In short, I counted 40 hours of pretty good wasted time.
40 hours… That’s a full work week. I’m unemployed, by the way. Imagine if you were unemployed too and you suddenly had 40 hours, what would you spend it on? I haven’t been to the gym for a month now, convincing myself that I don’t have time for it 😃
The bottom line is obvious. A couple of hours of my leisure time could have been converted into useful focused study time. I knew I was resting too much, but let’s just say I wasn’t seeing the whole picture. Obviously, with so much spare time, I just have to devote at least 40 hours each week to studying. What do you think?
I think my stats are a problem and definitely need to be monitored. Your bets. Will I learn more after this reserch?
