Time in a Bottle
A Postmortem Analysis of How I Spent 2020
I know we’re 4 months into 2021 already, but to be fair, my brain still thinks it’s 2019, so please cut me some slack.
If you’ve ever worked on an assignment with me in college, then you might know that for the past 2 years, I’ve been a huge fan of time tracking apps.
At the beginning of freshman year, I experimented with time tracking as a productivity motivator for me to take advantage of all the little nooks and crannies that my schedule had. The more I used it, the more I appreciated the insight that I gained about how I worked — how many hours I spend per assignment, how sporadically I liked to work, etc. I also enjoyed the sense of accomplishment I got from completing a non-trivial task, checking it off of my tasks list, and admiring all of the hours it took to get it done. (Okay, that’s a bit geeky, but this is an article about time tracking, so I feel like I’m supposed to geek out.)
While many things about 2020 have been…terrible, to say the least, one of the more interesting changes it brought to our lives was converting every one of our regular activities into a remote setting. Since remote events take place online on platforms that typically track user data, the time we spend on them is very simple to access, which makes the little time tracker personality inside my head quite happy. To phrase this in less abstract terms, COVID-19 pushed me to take up gaming as an outlet for entertainment and socializing, and both Steam and Epic Games (the platforms I use as a PC gamer) do a fantastic job of tracking how many hours I’ve played of every game I own.
So, at the end of last December, I scraped data from my work time tracker, Steam pages, Epic Games store, and tracker.gg to compile a summary of how I spent my (structured) time in the year of 2020. What would I learn about myself, I wondered, and how did I react to the isolation of quarantine?
Hmm. If you’re a parent, then you’re probably outraged by how many hours I sink into video games. Clearly, the pandemic has turned me into a gamer, which is not too surprising. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I’ll probably be chewing on this data for the next few months, but there’s two takeaways I can immediately see.
First, I spend much more time on hobbies than I originally thought. Personally, I associate a lot of my identity with what I do in terms of productivity (e.g. right now, I primarily see myself as a college student majoring in computer science) and I imagine many other students think in the same way. As the data shows, this kind of perspective lets our “main” interests misleadingly overshadow our side passions. For example, I’ve spent more time last year playing my favorite video game (shameless plug for Total War: Three Kingdoms) than I have in my 2 hardest CS core courses (15–213 & 15–150), combined. It’s not that I’m ditching class to play video games — my grades have been doing just fine, even with remote learning. Rather, my passion for the content I enjoy in games is strong enough to match even my passion for my college major, which is an insight I did not expect to learn about myself.
Second, there is so much more that I don’t know about myself. When I was constructing this data, I came across the somewhat scary realization that the above pie chart is probably the most honest representation of who I was in 2020. After all, we are what we choose to do, and a report revealing everything I’ve structured time to accomplish last year is the most accurate, objective reflection of my identity. And yet, there is so much that this data compilation doesn’t cover.
Let’s do some quick math. There were 365 days * 24 hours = 8760 hours last year, 1613 of which I spent working and 1121 of which I spent playing games. If I make the generous assumption that I sleep 8 hours a day, then including 8*365 = 2920 hours of sleep, that’s a jaw-dropping 3106 hours that are unaccounted for in the year of 2020. I probably spent these unstructured hours eating, cooking, calling friends, blogging, procrastinating, and who knows what else, but what’s shocking is the sheer quantity. I spent about 500 more hours on unmeasured time than I did on school, work, or video games all combined.
So what does this say about my identity? If I should identify as the activity I spend the most time on, then I guess I really have no idea who I am. At the same time, I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing that I’m unsure where the majority of my time goes, even if I’m striving to be a meticulous time tracker. I’d like to think it means that my life can’t be fit into a neat, plain box with a boring label on it, like “computer science student” or “gaming addict”. Instead, what I do and who I am is better defined by all the little, organic things that pop up all the time that we can’t structure, like wasted hours trying out a failed recipe or receiving a message out of the blue from an old friend. Basically, I’m saying to embrace the small things in life, because when weaved together, they mean so much more to us than the big things that suck up all our stress and attention.
Whew, okay, that went pretty deep for some arithmetic and a pie chart. If you got this far, thanks for sticking around, dear reader! I strongly recommend you download a time tracker from the app store if you haven’t already, and who knows? Maybe a year from now, you’ll learn a lot more about how you spend your time, or maybe you’ll also realize how much you don’t know about yourself — it’s a valuable lesson either way.
