Time is the scarcest resource
My experiment in tracking every second of my life
“Time is the scarcest resource, unless it is managed, nothing else can be managed.” — Peter Drucker
In the past few years I started using time trackers like Rescue Time and Toggl in order to better understand how I spent my time at work and optimize to maximize results.
But why optimize only how time is spent at work? Why not understand how time is constantly spent and optimize for a better life.?
“What gets measured, gets managed” — Peter Drucker
The financial planning industry and services like Mint.com have shown us that if we measure our spending habits, we can plan, budget, and spend better. However in my search to better plan, budget and spend my time I could not find a service that allowed me to measure how time is spent over the course of an entire day.
The human mind is great at distorting information to make a hypothesis true, especially when its describing its own behavior. A big part of the reason to start using time trackers is because we can not accurately remember how we spent our time. The mind emphasizes past events based on various factors like their emotional association which causes time compression and dilatation of past events. Which is great for recalling important events, but not very effective in measuring how time was spent.
I decided to use Toggl to keep track of my time. I have used it in the past to track my work because it has an easy to use interface that can be accessed from any device and does not take much time to switch the timer, which is important if you are going to keep track of everything you do. As great a tool as this is, it quickly became clear to me that it was not designed to keep track of every activity in life. When I set my activity to sleeping, the next morning I usually get an email telling me that my timer is still running 8 hours later. At the end of each week the report would never show exactly 168 hours, it ranged from 158 — 177 hours per week. This is expected since I manually would have to change the timer every time a new activity was being performed or when I forgot to start the timer I would manually input the entry which had to be estimated.
Another challenge is how to classify entries. Right now I’m eating breakfast while I’m writing, so I have the timer recording this as breakfast even though I’m also writing, so is it breakfast or writing? Ideally I should make a new category called “writing while eating breakfast” to see how that compares to just eating breakfast or focused writing.
When I put my first month in perspective, I have logged a total of 993 hours. 337 hours Sleeping, 137 hours spending time with friends and family, 135 hours eating, 71 hours traveling for work, 51 hours for tasks for my work, 50 hours in the bathroom (including showers), 36 hours on work related email, 28 hours on reading to list the top categories.
One insight gathered here is that I spent nearly 60% of my time on things that might be considered unproductive personally or professionally: sleeping, traveling, eating and the bathroom.
I did have significant change in my life at the time I started this experiment. I was transitioning the sale of a time consuming business and became a first time father so its unclear what effects that had on how I spent my time as I did not track it prior, however I definitely did not wake up 3am in the past two years.
I now have nearly 5 months of data. I have yet to make any changes to my schedule and so there has not been much change from the first month of observation. Sleeping, eating, bathroom and travel now takes up 56% of all my time which is about what it was before with the exception of travel which now takes up 5% of my time down from 7%.
Now comes the task of figuring out how to optimize my time for doing things that are productive and enjoyable.
I generally find travelling(cars, planes and trains. Not vacations.) wasteful. I’m glad I got it down to 5% of my time and while there maybe room to get it down even more, it will not make a dramatic difference in my life at this point.
Work smarter, not harder.
Its interesting to find that the amount of time I spent actually working on tasks related to my business was 5% of my time, while work related travel was the second largest time use at 2.5%. All together the total time spent on anything related to my business was 12% of my total time.
Perhaps the most important part of the business which I classified as new business development and new business building makes up only 1/2% of my time. Which shows that there is room for magnitudes of order improvement in how I operate the business.
The single biggest opportunity might be in sleep which currently takes up over 1/3rd of all my time. I have read about polyphasic sleep being done over the course of a month but have not heard of it being sustainable for longer periods and very little research has been done into the longer term health effects. I have held off from trying polyphasic sleep as various work obligations would have interfered with such a schedule, which is the other difficulty, most of the world operates based on a monophasic sleep schedule. Still, the mere fact most of the world operates this way does not automatically mean its the best way.
The next largest category is eating which takes up 13% of my total time. To be fair I frequently have the bad habit of reading while I eat. I’m sure I can drastically reduce the time spent here if did not read or watch TV while I eat. I’m sure the meals would be more enjoyable being mindful while I eat as well.
Shopping and housework combined take up nearly 2.5% of my time. I don’t enjoy either and perhaps using grocery delivery and maid services would cut that time down and allow me to allocate it to either high leverage work which is worth more then the money I save by not using these services or to more enjoyable activities like writing which in the past 5 months has been 0.1% of my time.
If you have any ideas on how to better allocate time for maximum happiness, please let me know.
