Tracking time
What I have learned from tracking my time use
I have tracked my time since the beginning of 2014. Everything I do, in 10 minute intervals.
Tracking has increased my awareness of the things I do. I have a better sense of time, and know pretty well how much time I spend daily or weekly in various activities.
I have also experienced new kind of accountability. I want to use most of my time doing things I value the most. Doing something else triggers an impulse to change to a more fruitful activity.
Based on my tracking, I have also taken action and changed my behavior.
I will elaborate on each of the points above, but first some background.
Why I started tracking my time
They say becoming a parent changes everything. And they are so right.
In 2008 and 2009 I became a father of two amazing kids. At first, it felt quite natural to spend all my time with them — witnessing the miracle of life and seeing how they grow and learn new things. But as the years went by, it occurred to me that I no longer had any free time or time for myself.
I wanted to know where all my time went. Not the working hours but all the rest. Time I earlier had for hobbies, friends, reading and just doing nothing. I thought there must be something I could do less and recover more time for the things I was able to do before.
I wasn’t trying to optimize my work or become more efficient. I wondered if I could find out how different actions affect my happiness. I wanted to set priorities — not to individual tasks but to categories. My goal was to devote more time to things that I value the most.
How I track
In the end of 2013 I learned about time-use survey methodology. Based on the guidelines I created a simple diary script. I made it mobile friendly so I could log my time-use anywhere, anytime.
I started tracking my main action and optional side action. (For example, my main action could be reading books and side action child care. If I wasn’t taking care of the kids, I might be doing something else than reading.) I would also log where and with whom I am. I could add a description or a rating to the activity, but I seldom bother.
Since I was doing this for myself only, I believe I was able to be brutally honest. I really wanted to see where my time went, not some ideal picture of it.
I tried to build a habit of logging time continuously. Whenever I changed tasks, I would use a few seconds to fill in and submit the form. I often failed and had to enter one or two day’s activities in retrospect. In June 2015 I quit tracking for many weeks. I started again in August, and much later tried to fill in the blanks using mostly Google Maps location history.
I’m still struggling to make it easier to log time use — especially on times when I’m not using computer, tablet or phone. I’m hoping to automate most of my time tracking. The basic components are already in place, only the integration is missing.
Moves app is a great helper, logging my locations. My calendar knows when I have meetings. RescueTime tracks which apps I’m using on both my phone and computers. I have various ways to see when I go to sleep and when I wake up. Although I already collect all this information into a single place, I’m still entering the data manually into my time tracking journal.
What tracking has taught me
In the beginning of this post I promised to elaborate on some main takeaways I have gotten from tracking my time. Here are the most important things that come to my mind.
Awareness
The greatest impact took place already before I began to analyze the data.
When I learned to track my time, I became more aware of what I was doing. I developed a habit of looking at the time more often — when I started or quit an activity. If I didn’t log the events right away, I’d have to remember them.
I developed a habit of checking the time when I changed from an activity to another. Sometimes I was quite surprised. A quick game with the kids or fixing a simple bug in a piece of code often took much longer than I had thought. Shopping is much faster alone than with the family — even more so than it had estimated.
I also became more aware of doing two things simultaneously. I believe that so called multitasking at work is mostly context switching — you’re not doing two things at the same time but pieces of two things sequentially. However, you can easily walk and have a conversation or listen to music while cooking. Some people work out and watch TV at the same time. I try to read (books or Medium) while commuting with public transport, and solve problems (work or hobby related) when walking.
Accountability
I also started to value the things I did. Does watching TV make me happy? Do I spend most of my time with people I value the most?
I began asking myself whether the things I did were really worth doing. And I knew that everything I do, is tracked. If I just browse these Facebook status updates for an hour, I have to log it later.
I think that tracking my time started a process where I’m more actively trying to be the person I would like to be.
Action
I try to minimize doing things that aren’t valuable to me. I sometimes feel that I have little control over my doings. As if everyone else were wanting me to do different things and I tried to fulfil at least some of the wishes. But looking at the data reveals that there’s a lot of room for my own decisions. If I accept the responsibility of my choices, life becomes a little easier. I am the General Manager of my life.
Of course, there are plenty of expectations from others. And there are things that simply need to be done. In those cases, I try to resist the resistance, accept the task and make it mine. If I can’t change the tasks, I change my mindset.
If my son wants to build Legos with me for two hours, I might as well immerse myself into play and enjoy it.
Using an hour daily to prepare food isn’t wasted time if I learn to love cooking. And the cook’s mindset usually affects the look and taste of the meal.
Tracking time takes time, about 10 minutes each day. If my only motivation was to get the data, I wouldn’t bother. But logging my daily activities serves also other purposes. It gives me a chance to look back to and reflect on my day. I can think about the choices I made. I can appreciate and cherish each moment and be thankful of them. I have turned a dull and frustrating chore into a meditative experience.
What the data tells about me
After three years of tracking I have an interesting view to my life.
Last year, I spent more than a third of my time sleeping and eating. (Personal care took 36.7% of my time. In addition to sleeping and eating it also includes other personal care such as changing clothes, taking a shower and brushing teeth.)
Employment (main and second job and employment activities) takes only 17% of my time (around 29 hours a week), a bit more than domestic work (16%). If sleeping is excluded, my most common main activity category is leisure with 34% share.
I spend more than half of my time at home; slightly less than half if sleep is excluded. 15% of all my time is spent in the office (22% of waking hours).
The year 2016 had 8 784 hours. More than 5 000 of them I spent with my wife, and more than 3 000 with kids.
Typical day
The first image in this post shows an animation of months from January 2014 to February 2017. Each frame in the animation represents a typical day in that month.
The chart below is my typical day in 2016. It is an average of all the days in the year. I believe that the format is familiar to time use researchers and enthusiasts.
Sleep dominates my days from 4 to 9 in the morning and again from 10 in the evening. I sometimes start working before 7 but usually stop before 5. Child care takes significant amount of time between 6 and 8 in the evening.
When I started analyzing the data, most of it was what I expected: sleeping, commuting, working, child care, other domestic chores, etc. The big picture didn’t offer big surprises. On the other hand, when I had estimated the time I was spending daily to all those things, they didn’t quite add up to 24 hours.
Tracking allowed me to find those extra hours in the week I was unaware of.
I have two hours every night for myself
On regular weekdays, 9 to 11 in the evening is my free time. TV and video (dark blue on top in the chart above) take a big part of it, almost equal to other computing (i.e. hobby programming or blogging, in lighter blue).
In the evening, I sometimes feel too tired to do anything fruitful. Especially if putting kids to bed has taken a lot of energy. On those nights I usually resort to watching TV with wife. But more and more often I try to remind myself that these are my two hours. It’s up to me how I use them.
Usually that knowledge alone makes it easier to grab a computer and write a few lines of code. Sometimes I even venture to a gym after 9. (I couldn’t do it alone, though. Fortunately I have a friend for late night workouts.) I also try to avoid postponing washing dishes or other household upkeep to those hours.
I take long leaves
The most striking observation from my typical day chart is the small amount of work. Since on most days I work for about 8 hours, working should take a third of my time, right?
Year 2016 had 107 Saturdays and Sundays and 7 national holidays. I’m happy to have 32 days of yearly vacation. Last year I took some extra days off work. There are many days in the year when I’m not working.
In my work, quality is more important than quantity. I don’t provide the greatest value to my employer by working harder but by performing better. In my experience, taking breaks improves quality. A lot of my work includes innovation, coming up with new ideas and looking at things from various perspectives. I perform better in those tasks when I have time to rest and think about other than work-related things.
Usually nothing breaks even if I’m away from work for 5 or 6 weeks. When my son started school in August 2015, I took a 5 month leave to make sure that he would be free from stress in the mornings. During my 5 month leave some things got screwed pretty bad at work. But that’s another story.
I spend most of my free time with family
I have a pretty good balance between work and free time. Weekends and vacations provide plenty of free time in addition to those two hours every day.
I recently made a self assessment that asked me to rate the following items in my life based on how satisfied I was with them:
- Work
- Family
- Nutrition
- Friends
- Sleep and recovery
- Own time and self-development
- Free time and hobbies
- Sports and active life
Three years ago, I would probably have given low ratings to 6 and 7, because I felt I didn’t have enough time for them. Based on my tracking, I was now pretty happy with my free and own time. The lowest score went to friends.
The chart above shows who I spent my leisure time with in 2016. In January I spent a week in the Alps with my brother and cousin. After that, other family members than my wife and kids haven’t gotten a lot of time from me. I hope to spend more time with friends and brothers in 2017.
How tracking is changing me
I have made some changes to my life after I started tracking and analyzing my time use. The biggest reward, however, may be that I feel happy, or at least content and satisfied. When I look at the data, I like what I see. I’m not doing all the things I was before my kids were born, but there’s very little in my life I would want to do less. I have found slots of time that are mine, and I’m doing my best to make the most out of them.
I’m still making changes. I have set a goal to meet friends at least once a week. I’m devoting more time to physical activity instead of TV and computer. I will continue tracking my time use and reflecting on my days. I hope to save some precious minutes weekly by automating parts of the process.
My time tracking journal allows me to rate each activity and track how I was feeling at different times. I would love to correlate changes in my mood to various events and variables in my life. So far, though, I’ve been too lazy to actually assess and log my mood. I also shifted from constant time tracking to daily retrospecting. This makes it a bit harder to estimate how I was feeling during the day.
Let’s see what I come up with.
Recommended reading
A different kind of approach to tracking time use. Very manual and tangible.
Stats about activities of American people, including a typical American day.
A blog post about why it’s important to track also your mood.
