Life. Basics of time-measurement
A year ago I was stressed with a need to measure my productivity. As we all know, reading books and articles about time-management doesn’t help — dozens of suggestions seem to suit everyone except you.
That time I already had experience tracking some of life events with wearables and Getting-Things-Done apps. But the goal was more psychological than quantitative— how to make a stable system of self-development and understand personal progress both in time and progress coordinates.
Suddenly the book by Daniil Granin “This strange life” (Даниил Гранин “Эта замечательная жизнь”) refreshed my mind. It is a story about 20th century Russian scientist Alexander Lubischev, who wrote down everyday life events for more than 50 years (http://blog.ideabulbs.com/2010/12/alexander-lubischev-this-strange-life.html — maybe the only article in English).
Let me quote:
In his lifetime Alexander Lubischev wrote about 12500 pages of scientific works, which is impressive even for the most prolific professional fiction writers. Daniil Granin offers a glimpse into the extraordinary way of life of Professor Lubischev. In 1916, at the age of 26 he formulated his supreme goal in life which was to found a new science: mathematical biology.
The goal was massive and required a huge amount of time. Under usual conditions, one would have to live at least 200 years to achieve that goal. The only way to find time was to reduce waste and take advantage of every minute. So, Professor Lubischev invented his own time-tracking system and kept following it for 56 years until his death in 1972 (without lapsing from it a single time!). Even such personal disasters as the death of his son could not dent the steel of his willpower.
Professor Lubischev’s system prescribed to track the time spent on a particular activity to within 5 minutes. At the end of each month and each year Lubischev produced reports, which allowed him to analyze his activities. All work was accomplished in strict accordance to 5-year plans. The whole routine was done on paper — in ordinary exercise books — and everything had to be calculated without any computers or calculators. A monthly report would take 2–3 hours, an annual report 17–20 hours.
Professor Lubischev divided his work into categories. The first category inclued his main work (writing books and research). The second category — lectures, fiction books. Other categories: socializing, commuting, personal affairs etc. A normal monthly work time was 300 hours, which amounts to 10 hours a day. The time-tracking system was Lubischev’s day-to-day tool, as usual as a walking stick or glasses. He admitted that he was not able to work without it. Professor Lubischev adhered to his own principles, which saved him a great deal of time:
- he never took compulsory and urgent errands
- when he felt tired, he stopped working to take a rest
- he used to sleep long, up to 10 hours
- he combined tiresome activities with pleasant ones Lubischev never waited for glory and never pursued material wealth or high ranks. Most of his life he spent teaching at universities in the back of beyond in Russia. His rule was: No amount of time is too small for a useful thing. He was aware that time-management was something more than just keeping track of time. It was much more about understanding the meaning of one’s actions.
- Like all great scientists, Lubischev never lived by science alone and possessed comprehensive knowledge in different fields: literature, religion, history. He could speak French, German, Italian and English. Believe it or not, Professor Lubischev studied English exclusively in busses and trams, when commuting between home and work. Nonetheless, he was able to engage himself as an interpreter at scientific conferences in the 1930s.
This book was an inspiring impression and I decided to structure my life with a method similar to Lubischev. The start was very blind, but a few weeks later I structured all life events to this list:
Sleep. Obviously we all do this.
Meals. I didn’t separate it to home/restaurant. Cooking included.
Work. I split work to sub-categories (3 that time), for every project I was in, measuring each sub-cat and total.
Reading books.
Reading web. I put here time intervals for web pages and articles, used in work or with educational purpose. Funny pics and social media were not included.
Education. Languages and e-courses sub-categories.
Walk. Outdoors promenades to refresh brains.
Sports. All here: infrequent jogging and gym.
Social. Time intervals, spent for all relatives, relations and friends; cultural and networking events.
Pause. A category to describe all time losses you can’t avoid: transportation, work pauses etc.
Lost time. My favorite in the list. Includes all stuff you waste time on: soap operas, social networks, procrastination.
At start it was difficult to list every event in the list. The results of week one were terrible — it was a visual shock, to see that you have less time than you thought.
For first seven days I spent 62 hours sleeping, 14 hours on meal, 25 hours on work (WTF, I thought I’ve been working very hard!?), 8 on walks (and social, I added it as a sub-cat later), 5 on education, 3 on books and 43 hours total I’ve spent on transportation, procrastination, pauses etc.
I was shocked. Ok, obviously you spend 1/3 of life sleeping and the real work is less than you think. But that week 27% of my life had no meaning at all; more than time spent on work, education and entertainment total.
That was a challenge and I didn’t stop tracking time. I set a goal to decrease time losses and increase all productive categories (work, education, hobbies).
I worked accurate (no distractions or defocusing). Made a rule to fill all long pauses practicing languages or reading e-book. Started a “big Saturday walk” rule. Stopped watching funny youtube clips and browsing facebook feed.
Next image shows stats for 12 weeks (3 months):
Yes , I finally reached some progress. On week 12 I spent more time working than loosing.
But the real excitement was that now I had enough time for education and books, meeting friends and culture events. Those hours appeared from nowhere.
During 3 months I’ve reached measurable progress in most areas of my life and it was the most important time-management lesson I’ve ever experienced.
See, how week 12 stats changed from week 1:
As you see, even 5% of daily time matters a lot: I heartedly reduced time for things that don’t matter for me and this gave results for significant goals.
Here are main observations from those 12 weeks:
- Don’t think you have 24 hours in a day. As you see, sleep and meal categories are very stable and take ~45% (10 hours) every day.
- Your productivity is limited. One day I spent all day for work and education (literally, 40 min work -> 10 min pause ->40 min work etc. with only stops for breakfast and lunch). Even that day I lost 12% of total daytime for breaks and pauses. I suppose, 15–18% of day losses is the minimum possible value for timing of a VERY productive person.
- That means, you have maximum 35% (8,5 hours) of daytime for self-development. All work, education, entertainment included.
- If we speak about time, it’s very hard to be more productive. As you see from week1 <-> week12 comparison image, time losses decreased more than 25%, but it gave only few per cent total productivity growth.
- If you take this method, you can build very long-lasting plans. Indeed, it’s easy to make your 5-years plan if you understand what exactly these five years will contain.
- Tracking life events doesn’t take much time. I took a simple notepad with me and wrote down all events with 5-min interval. Every week I put the data to excel. All these actions took ~1.5 hour/month (0.2%).
- I consider the method more psychological. You promise yourself not to lie, choose categories you want to track and keep the promise. Same time, it is quantitative as the progress can be described with calculated numbers.
- Remember — there is no unneccesary time. Even if you travel, there is no need to make a separate category for travelling. For trips (78 days from 365 in 2013) I used same categories. In my case, there is no “vacation” time, a book or a walk can act as vacation; otherwise you eat, socialize or just loose time.
As my summer was a bit relaxing this year, I restarted this practice of time-measurements from 1st September. Now the goal is 365 days of daily measurement and control.
Hope, this was a relatively good starting explanation. For questions, please contact me at facebook (facebook.com/werston).
