If you discovered you were going to die in a year, would you continue to spend all your time being "productive"? I figure almost everyone would shift all their focus on doing things that "really matter".
Sadly I believe the world managed to make us feel guilty when we're not doing something that makes someone else rich (majority of jobs).
I'm a pessimist so I'd probably get very sad at some real data telling me how many hours I have wasted making someone else money.
For a point of contrast, though, every now & then I'll log my activities for a week -- just a week -- as a way of auditing my commitments. Am I spending a lot of time on things I don't value? Am I enjoying what I'm doing?
At this stage in my career/life, I actually want to put a limit on my employed hours. Side projects, family life, exercise, hedonism are the things I want to balance with that paid work -- I've done the burnout thing and am simply not interested in doing it again. These semi-regular audits are in some sense reassuring, in fact, and allow me to appreciate all the possibilities I have. "Ah, if I shift this to there, I can do this cool thing. Ah, I do spend five hours per week on leisurely and delicious morning meals. Life is decent!" And sometimes they find tasks or commitments I realize I want to eliminate, or point out that if I simply took ten minutes on Thursday to talk through with my spouse what I want to do on Saturday, then we'd have tickets to the museum/ingredients to make a roast duck/whatever -- the things I want to be doing on a weekend.
- If You're So Smart, Why Aren't You Happy?
- The Right Life: Human Individuality and Its Role in Our Development, Health and Happiness
Both books are focused on reshaping our effort and expliciting our real needs to make us happier.
> I knew I was spending quite a lot of it on social media, but I wasn't sure how much exactly. I also knew I was working quite a lot and wanted to quantify exactly how much (spoiler alert: not that much). I hoped that keeping track of what I do would help me to identify chunks of time that were being wasted and to turn them into quality time.
Tracking time doesn't inherently have to be to optimize for "making someone else rich"; she specifically did this with the goal of spending more time on things that "really matter".
That said, perhaps the alluring part was gathering data on one's self.
It's just my personal experience that the majority of time we label as "productive" is in fact productivity for the sake of someone else profiting on top of it. I have nothing against the OP or the article.
You got the wrong pronoun. "One gal's quest to optimise her life" is the blog's subtitle.
Coming to this pretty late, but I've been fascinated with the concept of flow recently, which researcher Mihaly Csikszentmihaly described as:
“The best moments in our lives are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times . . . The best moments usually occur if a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile”
There have been a few studies that were pointing out people in Southern Italy live very long and happy lives (I think happiness was self-reported), despite living in relative poverty compared to developed countries. Sun + healthy diets + lots and lots of intense social interactions with family and close friends.
If you had a year to live, you would definitely want to be productive. There's a lot that needs to get done to wrap up your one single life well, so that your time on earth wasn't lost. Just getting your will and testament done, talking to all your loved ones, getting your affairs in order for any dependents, tying up any loose ends so they aren't inherited, cleaning up your house for the estate.
If you know older people, you'll see them doing these kinds of activities in their later years. That's still being productive. You're still making progress.
You'd be surprised.
That's more of rat-race-disease artifact, where a person is measured by their "achievements" and "success" (as opposed to being intristically worth).
Many people of many peoples would want to either relax, love and be with family, or enjoy themselves (and more likely a healthy combination of the two).
No, I'd want to be happy. It's the uniquely American Calvinist view that conflates these things.
The article has a completely different tone than what you are assuming from the headline.
~~~
4 points per hour for the most productive activities (focused work towards uni & self-improvement and exercising)
3 points for reading books
2 points for reading blogs, listening to podcasts, lower intensity work etc
0 points for things that are important but I do them anyway (socialising, sleep etc)
-4 points for procrastination
No mention of making someone else money. But a mention of being a procrastinator with life.
My point is that the majority of "productive" things we do are geared towards our jobs. And the majority of jobs enrich the people at the top at the expense of your expertise and time invested. YMMV.
Not sure why so many people assumed I had a bad view on the article or the OP. I think what was done was fascinating, but it made me sad.
I learned more through HN than I did with many books. Reddit improved my day through stupid memes that made me laugh more times than I can remember.
Yet when I'm browsing those sites, I feel guilty. Even while writing this very comment.
That's what saddens me.
I'm also doing my PhD so by trying to increase my at-work productivity I'm trying to make sure that I don't waste too much of taxpayer's money.
But I agree that optimising productivity too much could be anxiety-inducing and I was trying to be mindful of that while looking at my data and deciding what to change in my life based on it.
But if you are going to try and do things that "really matter" don't you want to be productive at them?
I've seen a number of folks with ALS who have done amazing things with the time they had left, and I am sure they focused on their productivity in doing them.
This also isn't a hypothetical for me. I have a damaged spinal cord and have spent amazing amounts of time tracking data to try and improve my body and my life. Not the same as facing death since I am trying to optimize my time to get back to a point where my body is stronger and in less pain so I can spend more time with my kids and also do the other things I want. It is a very tough balance.
I'd definitely try to, hehe.
For me it's more about what we categorize as productive than the experiment itself. The experiment is a great way to gather data. But the categorization made me really think about what people, in general, categorize as "productive".
Maybe sleeping should be way more important than many job related things, but by default we assume sleeping is just a necessity, many times sacrificing it in favor of the others.
All right, yeah, desire vectors are different for different people, homie.
If this person was out for optimizing income, tye6 would not have studied a PhD in the first place, because that's 6 years wasted, plus tuition on top of it.
You can your tracking to optimize for whatever variable you want to optimize. You could realize that you work too much and aim for working less. You could realize that you do social media too much and aim to do less of it, etc. It's up to you.
As for not making money. The world is, sadly highly biased towards rich people. If you are poor and happy (which is totally possible) you are still highly at risk that this state won't last. Without money, you are f*ed in this world. It's just the way it is. If you are dependent on income you are dependent on A LOT of things. The best you can generally do for your happiness is become income independent as fast as possible, which usually means to earn as much as possible as early as possible and then live from investments while focusing on everything that's not work.
Decades ago I spent a day travelling with a company salesman. That afternoon we spent an hour non-productively talking. In a candid moment he confessed that, out on the road, he'd missed most of his children growing up. He encouraged me not to make that mistake. Somewhat later in another place, a college professor, in a non-productive moment, related a similar story and advice. These revealing moments changed my life.
Recently I saw the video "50 years off-grid" about a couple that moved onto 240 Cali redwood acres in 1968 and took back their lives. Eventually they grew and sold Xmas trees for support, and raised two children. Not for everyone ... but point being that there are options, depending on what desires we nurture and sacrifice for.
Such chains have been woven and worn as far back in history as we can see. And still, true freedom can be a terrifying prospect. Which explains some modern leadership choices.
"Good morning," said the little prince.
"Good morning," said the merchant.
This was a merchant who sold pills that had been invented
to quench thirst. You need only swallow one pill a week,
and you would feel no need for anything to drink.
"Why are you selling those?" asked the little prince.
"Because they save a tremendous amount of time," said the
merchant. "Computations have been made by experts. With
these pills, you save fifty-three minutes in every week."
"And what do I do with those fifty-three minutes?"
"Anything you like..."
"As for me," said the little prince to himself, "if I had
fifty-three minutes to spend as I liked, I should walk at
my leisure toward a spring of fresh water."
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little PrinceWe all have one only life, some people prefer to spend it watching football, some being productive, some helping others, and some ...
Of course you will also find people who are not happy at the life they have, and trying to live the life of others. But you will also find people being happy doing things that make other people sad.
It’s so easy it gets skipped over in almost every thread like this, it seems, where someone goes off on some expedition of personal development and chooses to write about it to share with others where inevitably someone comes along to pontificate why anyone would even bother.
There’s not always going to be some neat, logical nor highfalutin reason for an individual making a choice about documenting, recording and analyzing parts of their life.
And that’s fine. Promise.
No.
But if I discovered I was going to die in 30 years time, and I wanted to make sure my house was paid for, I'd done the things I want to do, and there were savings in the bank to make sure my partner was safe, then I absolutely would. Most of us are closer to that position than being on the verge of imminent death.
Are you going to track goals every 15 minutes? I doubt it.
You cannot fight this with a clock watch the same way the vast majority of people cannot lose weight by simply dieting. For this, you need positive incentives. Not to be misunderstood, sometimes you have simply to grit your teeth.
And my sentiment is also from reading some of the comments here. So many people obsessed with productivity.
Some have a clear reason to do so, but I fear many do it because of outside pressures, or never even thought about it.
Why do we read about "I work less than I thought I did and that's ok" and not e.g. "I spent more time with my family than I thought I did, and that's great"?
Nah. I'd ensure that my family is going to be well-cared for, that all affairs are in order... and then proceed to blow the remaining time on videogames and whatever strikes my fancy. With an actual dead line of one year, there's no point in starting anything that "really matters" to me.
Now if I knew for certain I'll die in exactly 10 years, I'd optimize the shit out of my life. I'd be a god of productivity. Or at least I'd try. In reality, knowing that my life is likely to actually end in somewhen between 30 to 50 years is already giving me this motivation.
Because the problem here isn't the focus on productivity, but what you're trying to be productive about. Most of us live lives full of things we wouldn't want to do if we could afford it. It makes sense to try and optimize them to minimum - to make room for the stuff that "really matters".
Called to mind an Old Zen Koan. Before Enlightenment: chop wood, carry water. After Enlightenment: chop wood, carry water ;)
If lifecasting were automated, it would form a tremendous data set. The historical antecedents are legion: Vannevar Bush's Memex. Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion Chronograph. Gordon Bell's MyLifeBits. Yes, even YC's own Justin.tv. Simple daily plain text often works best for me. Re-visiting old entries is gold. Like inviting your younger self over for a cup of tea ;)
Wouldn't that be useful? Considering your own example: might that not send you one a path to change the fraction of time you do something you don't like.
And what's wrong with "making someone else money" if it also provides you something you want (presumably in this case, also money)? If you were earning money "making someone else a meal" would that be equally bad?
My focus is on things that would be expected to pay off before my life runs out. The less life I have left, the more I do things for short term gain rather than long term.
For example, at age 18 investing in college for 4 years is an excellent investment. Doing it in your 60s doesn't make a whole lot of practical sense.
It's the same with social media.
Once I realized that spending two hours a day on social media meant I was giving up 30 days of my life each year for... what? So someone in SV can buy a second boat, or a third house?
I limit my social media to under 15 minutes a day now (including HN.) If the social ad tech companies want more than that, they can pay me.
You obviously don’t think that, so I don’t get why you and grandparent are projecting that onto OP.
I want to minimize my wasted time like mindless Redditing so that I can maximize my time spent doing things that fulfill me. It’s just a great tragedy that it’s so much easier to waste time in unfulfilling ways like spending a day in a heroin nod than it is to do the things that maximize my life.
When you have longer to live, it makes sense to work now to get more of what "really matters" five, ten, and twenty years down the line.
I really challenge anyone to say with a straight face that they'd say on their deathbed "I wish I would have done more spreadsheets on the minutae of my life."
As humans we need a balance between living in the now and preparing for the future.
In college, one girl in my class died tragically, and we all discussed the meaning of spending hours cramming for exams. Those hours were definitely wasted on her, but I am still happy that I passed my exams.
Similar for listening to audio books etc. Personally quite dislike those kind of ideas as well, takes the joy out of recreation.
Ultimately we live just one life. I want to feel like I accomplished something and made my mark as trivially small as it may be compared to some. I want to hang my hat at the end of the day and feel like I had control over myself. In other words, I want to master good living and discipline.
Of course I want to see family, and friends, and all that. But there are many hours in the day, and why not fill them with your best effort? There will be plenty of time when I am old where I will want to do rest, leisure, etc.
I tend to agree that "productivity" is an unhealthy obsession linked to vain status chasing, and (among many circles) a vaguely sinister implication. It is too often used as a euphamistic criticism by employers who inevitably want more out of the workers. Produce or die is the default law of the capitalist jungle, so the "productivity number" is the number that a system would use to fire you.
But the OP's situation is quite different. There is no misalignment between "the boss" (his current analytical mind) and "the worker" (the daily mind/body cyborg beast). The boss really wants the best for the worker; the worker really wants to do his best for the boss. (And to me it seems like the boss has his priorities straight, and is doing right by his worker with this analysis and recommendations).
Yes, even more so. The way I define productivity is by doing things that return the largest ROI for me, both short term and long term.
Finding out how little focused work I do, even on the days that feel productive, was one of the biggest surprises of analysing my data. It turns out that a typical working day (9-17) would usually only give around 5-6 hours of actual work,
I'd be more than happy to get 5-6 hours of productivity in a day. I think even 2-3 hours of good focused work is really good for me.
PhD education is mostly real hard work so I wouldn't equate it to like reading emails etc. So yeah, this is super solid 5-6 hours of focused work solving some deep technical problems. Every day. This is no joke and nothing to feel bad about.
But why not argue the following instead: Most productive things we do are for someone else's benefit, so let's try to fill our time with more things that our productive to ourselves. Would you agree with this take?
Like, he actually did this. That in and of itself is pretty amazing. How many people do you know say stuff without really truly knowing what they’re talking about.
So can we just stop and appreciate for one sec this guy literally did this thing, and that’s actually amazing.
I see it rather sad when some people do nothing of their lives instead of investing a little bit every day in doing something meaningful. By no means I am advocating for 100% productivity at all times - but striving for a little less idle time is beneficial.
During the 2 weeks holidays I just finished I found I deeply enjoyed just sitting outside and watching bugs crawl over plants. It wasn't productive, insightful, educational or whatever but it was enjoyable and I felt better after doing it.
If I knew today would be my last I would obviously splurge and forget responsibilities I have to make my next day.
I feel like you didn't even read the post, since the work the author describes includes things like language learning; the fact that you take from this post the goal of making money for other people seems like projection. No where does the post mention even having a job.
This is a particular irk I have with HN commenters. They read the title and then respond to what they think the post would be.
But raising children is an investment in itself and the years where the demand for attention is higher (0-5 especially) are short in comparison to the future time you have for yourself.
I suppose you gain perspective and over those years an ability to optimize for time :)
This is interesting, because it's only a problem for non-rich people. Rich people solve this with nannies and babysitters and other home staff to take care of chores and child-rearing so they have more time for work or leisure activities.
It really puts a point on the whole "everyone has 24 hours in a day, but not everyone's 24 hours are equal".
Great point. Further driven by the pandemic
Maybe it means you have put in some meaningful work into having quality time with your kids, or teaching them something new, reading a book to them, or cooking with them and/or your spouse.
Side note I can definitely empathize with the lack of time for extracurricular. For our family it is generally something we do together - which tends to fill multiple “cups”. Outside of that my spouse and I trade off for time to do these type of things for ourselves.
It's by the Beeminder people, but works on its own. A hacky pile of perl scripts. I've run it continuously for 8 years now.
I've been a paid subscriber to http://rescuetime.com/ for almost a decade now. Passive tracking and analysis. But it is not much of a nudge to really focus on things. Thanks for the reminder.
I need to write up my Elasticsearch setup for indexing my health/rehab tracking data, but the code is here: https://github.com/gibrown/es-health-tracker and some of the older tracking I wrote about here: https://greg.blog/2018/06/15/relearning-to-walk-at-forty/
That's the perl version I linked. There's a similarly functional android version, I think.
- Byung-Chul Han
- we're constantly surveilled (school, jobs, gov't) and mostly we willingly submit to this
- r.e. "21st century is no longer a disciplinary society", yes it is, see my point above. we (they?) just succeeded in making the discipline less overt, more complicit. we don't need jails anymore we just need smartphones (see Social Dilemma)
- that list is not one of an "achievement society", rather, one of a consumption society lubricated by surveillance (masquerading as individualism, success etc)
Oui very much live in a Foucauldian world!
I agree that we still live in a Foucauldian world and that many of those factors remain. But what Han is getting at (and his broader thesis in 'The Burnout Society') is that a new series of societal dynamics have propogated from the modern citizen's raison d'etre of serving one's own aspiration, rather than that of the collective.
In Han's view, we live in a society where the Other is disappearing. This, in turn, creates all kinds of mental artifacts that hinder our overall experience and well-being.
> Stay tuned to learn how do different activities influence my mood
I only started doing that this year, and I'm pissed off I didn't start doing it earlier, as that's where you can start doing correlation on your life and your activities.
If some people are interested I have described how I track my life here : https://blog.luap.info/how-i-track-my-life.html
So if I had started when I had the idea, that would have been the neutral point, and I'd have had ~6 months of good days after that.
I'll probably never actually get to it, but it would be perfect for a thing like this.
It's really not a big deal to open an app, browse to the particular activity, and register it. But somehow in practice it is. It's another chore that I never really get around to doing consistently. And if you're not tracking data consistently, it's very quickly quite useless.
I have NFC tags everywhere (toothbrush, dental floss, water bottle, toilet, pills, plants), and I just tap my phone on them to track things. For the rest (e.g., exercise) I use Google Assistant on my phone and smart speakers.
It's working very well.
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20625346 for the description of source code (it's unfortunately not easy to actually share source code of Tasker scripts, at least not in an easy-to-read form).
The benefits of this approach over writing an app are, to quote: "I made it one afternoon in a grand total of ~30 minutes (including debugging and testing). It requires no Internet connection, doesn't spy on me, I can use it anywhere I am as long as I have my phone in my pocket, I get to own my data in a machine-readable format, which I can trivially send out to my desktop for processing later."
One of the interesting side effects of time-tracking is that I became very sensitive to how much can be done with very little effort, just by choosing the right tools.
Tasker is a huge productivity win for getting stuff done in the Android space.
Except I don't really track activity data except sleep.
I use it to track other things, such as my location, so that I can answer questions like "where was that restaurant i went to" or "what was that weird building i passed on the highway today".
I also built an air quality box that throws all kinds of stats on my indoor CO2 levels, PM2.5 levels, etc. as well in there.
I've been tracking all my time, also at a 15-minute resolution, for the past 24 months.
It seems to make new habits so much easier to adopt. The biggest surprise was how effective pre-tracking my time (aka time-blocking) was at programming myself to do things. Making things concrete and easy to visualize definitely helps in preventing procrastination.
I see that you used Google Sheets for time tracking. Did you consider using any other tools in conjunction, such as Google Calendar or automatic time-trackers such as ActivityWatch, RescueTime, Timing, ManicTime, or Memory? I have managed to automate 80% of my time tracking.
What's extra cool is we manage the free/busy time based on how much your schedule fills up, providing a bit more flexibility over static time blocking.
I tried to find an easy tracking workflow a few years back but all the apps had hidden dark patterns so I gave up.
I don't mean to be rude to anyone, but I definitely think that anyone interested in tracking everything in this sort of fashion should seriously consider their motivations. Why do you want this data? How do you separate public/private data? Knowledge is power and with power comes great responsibility and all that.
I have been doing the same for the last two years or so. I use Qbserve [1], a native (privacy-focused) time tracker for macOS developed by a couple living in Chile. The application keeps all the information on my computer in an SQLite database, making it very easy to analyze. I regularly reference it during my quarterly performance reviews to justify ups-and-downs in my results.
I will use this article as inspiration for writing a blog post sometime.
Coincidentally, I also saw a Reddit post last night [2] with the original poster's data analysis of all their expenses recorded through 2020. I bookmarked it because I collected similar information during the previous three years to write another blog post. Unfortunately, I am still unsure how to write such an article without revealing too much personal information.
[1] https://qotoqot.com/qbserve/
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/kp3fcn/a/
This sounds like a dystopian hell out of Big Brother.
To each their own.
I genuinely find the data I track useful to reflect on what I spend my time on and whatnot, especially when I want to answer questions like: Did I get enough time off from work —and programming, in general— last quarter? Did I use the X program enough to justify a license renewal? How much time did I spend on meetings versus actual programming? Did I get enough sleep last week? Am I having lunch at regular times? How much time am I spending on professional growth? Etc.
And for the sake of clarification, I started tracking my own time long before I got my current job, so clearly, I do not do it specifically for my performance reviews. I simply happen to find the data analysis useful to support some things I say, and also, as some people say “the more data you have, the more accurate the prediction”.
Drinking for 3-7 consecutive days, is not good for your liver, even in smaller quantities.
He was not that lucky, and was recently diagnosed with cirrhosis of the liver. Lost tens of pounds after they drained his belly of fluids - we'll have to see what happens next.
So yes, some are lucky, others - not so much. Either way, why risk it? It's like with smokers, you'll find a bunch of 80-90 year olds that have smoked daily since they were 12, but lots of others didn't make it.
As for OP, I have no idea what his drinking pattern is. But the only think that concerns me is the frequency of his drinks, especially if he's somewhat young. This is a pattern that can become hard to break out of, and can get worse with age.
See, for example: https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/323252#Even-light-...
Or: https://www.vox.com/2018/4/24/17242720/alcohol-health-risks-...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00917...
Now, as I learnt Google Apps Script, can use a simple HTML app, with GAS to easily log the hours or time slots.
Not everyone needs or wants this degree of personal metrics. But after reading about this, I admit having some device that tracked this automatically (and actually worked) would be more valuable to me than toys like pedometers. I wonder if that's getting close to plausible? Some you can already infer from various sensors / devices (e.g. sleeping, walking, talking on the phone, even whether the call is with friends/coworkers/clients). More might be learnable through AI (maybe analyzing audio / video feeds in a privacy-preserving manner)?
Apple's screen time is on Macs (starting with Catalina) which is probably enough for most people.
+ it is completely free, no ads, no nothing paid, not snooping your data
+ you don't have to unlock your phone - you can just type what you are doing inside the notification itself / choose from list of your usual activities
I've not gone for breaking by day up into 15 minute chunks, instead I've been timing myself as I do things, and noting down the duration rounded it to the nearest 15 minutes when I change tasks. I'm also not tracking everything, for example, showering. So I have a fair bit of missing time every day, which I'm aiming to get down to 2 hours or less a day.
I've already found myself using time more "productively" - preferring to do things which are tracked (like reading) over things which are not (like mindlessly browsing the internet).
There are a few key metrics I'm keeping an eye on:
- Average daily sleep deficit: `avg(8 - sleep hours)`
- Average daily work deficit: `avg(8 - work hours)` for work days
- Average daily missing time: `avg(24 - all hours)`
- Days since last day off work, not counting weekends
- Percentage of leisure hours: `avg(leisure hours / (all hours - sleep hours))`
I'm also watching how I spend my work days, for example, what proportion of my time is spent doing active work, or in meetings, or doing admin work.
I'll likely expand the things I'm specifically monitoring as I get more data.
For example, today's entry as of 18:32 is:
2021-01-03
leisure:anime .......................
leisure:social ..
sleep 6.5h
chores:foodprep .
chores:regular .
leisure:social ......
leisure:ttrpg:play ..........
I think that having a timer app which lets me start / stop timers individually and give them names would be helpful. The one I'm currently using, on my phone, just has a single stopwatch.
I disagree on this one.
Eating can and on good days should be a pleasure. It can also be very social. Eating together is an ancient tradition. Breaking bread.
It is a common misconception that it takes a lot of time. If you are not used to cooking yourself then it will take time to learn how (not just how to microwave),and then learn how to adapt it for your own taste buds. Then you get used to it and a lot of dishes can be made fresh in less than 10 mins.
It also involves going to the store. If going into a sad US supermarket with plastic wrapped everything, It is easy to understand the reluctance to spend time on it.
Yet a proper market with the flavors, the colors and variety it is a different experience.
I often feel happy once I have found a right cut of fish, I cant wait to get home, prepare it and eat it.
I am sad that in some countries and in some circles it is seen as a "must do/boring", instead of "This is going to be delicious".
For some scarfing down a Granola bar and a protein milkshake is what eating has been reduced to.
Granted that would save a lot of time and people are different.
Everyone should spend time satisfying the foundation of Maslow pyramid. that a lot of users of this site can take somewhat for granted (Not everyone :( )
Having been in the army for a while and at war ( As a means of getting out of a bad background) I was made aware of how important all the parts of the foundation is.
I swore to myself that I would always remember to be grateful when I enter a place that is dry and comfortable, when I have an actual bed to rest on, when I have dry clothing and boots in the morning, and how miraculous it is to have a say in, and the ability to not eat what minimally sustains you. A toilet that flushes and is private and a the ability for a shower.
We should all be conscious of the privileged it is to have these things available to us and take joy in it. It might not last.
Still even with old rations for 90 days straight the communal experience of sharing a meal was present.
Also sex. It is not mentioned in the schedule. That may be for puritanical reasons. That is no business of yours buddy, and that is fine, but spend a bit evaluating what is included and what is not. Most of this logged time in self actualization. Is it also a reflection of what the author is proud of / wants to share.
Eating and sex both can be wondrous or a ration pack that should have been thrown away 12 years ago. Both low on the pyramid.
Under socialising?
EDIT: Also, the point of this sort of exercise isn’t merely to ‘become more productive’ - it’s to gather data to help achieve whatever outcome you find valuable in your life. Maybe it’s studying more for his exams (certainly different than working more at your 9 to 5 bigco job fwiw), maybe it’s spending more quality time with family, etc. The point is collecting this sort of data doesn’t necessarily lead solely to optimizing your output under capitalism, it can be a tool for better living. I think.
On a large scale, science (and economics) is a drive to amass data, which has led to vast reductions in human suffering.
Amassing data lets one (and mankind) make decisions not on random conjecture or feeling, but on a solid footing, which results in better decisions on how to allocate resources. Not gathering data where it's possible to do so results in more human suffering from making sub-optimal decisions from bad inputs.
"Better" is extremely relative. Better for whom?
Same goes with tracking time spent on "human function" as the author described it. While I intentionally try not to be super anal about how much time I spent on certain activities, I think it's almost like a game to make the boring stuff as efficient as possible. As I've added more steps to my daily routines, I've also found ways to keep my time spent reasonable and make certain things asynchronous. Perfect simple example is doing the dishes during idle cooking time. My roommates don't do this and it boggles me.
Also, making those boring moments more exciting is always a plus. Music or a podcast in the shower and kitchen goes a long way, at least for me.
I did this for a month a while back, one realization I instantly had was that a lot of the my attention issues were caused by 'micro-interuptions'. For example, spending 8 minutes answering a support question on Slack and then going to write code - how do I record that? The same is largely true with Twitter or even HN, spend 5 minutes browsing instead of doing something with intention. Recording [Activity,Start,Stop] was preferable for me, the continuous scale made it really easy to track not just what I was doing, but the interstitial time when I didn't actively have a plan to do something.
Just setting out to record what I am doing helped to limit the number of things I was doing and made me be intentional about what they were. This post was relatively timely, as I actually started doing it again this morning.
My own experiments in this regard gather around more visual capture of data rather than manually recording the data. I use a piece of software to capture an image of the desktop (and which application is in focus) on all of the computers I use (laptops, workstation, kitchen computer) every few seconds. And I have number of 4K cameras setup in my office -- 12 split between office and server closet -- and two Kinects, and in my workshop, six more cameras, hooked up to a microcomputer that captures an image from each camera at a regular interval and stores it on the server.
I haven't done anything interesting with the data yet, beyond running basic "is someone in the office and should I capture that" detection.
I've got a few years of data captured at this point. Most of it boring, that consists of me staring thoughtfully at video screen, slouch in my chair playing a game, or napping on the floor.
I'm also using Google Sheet and I'm quite curious if I will be able to keep doing it until the end of the year.
I'm doing a vastly scaled down time logging for 2021 - I want to understand how I use my time at home after work. I'm using a time tracker app, sometimes in conjunction with a pomodoro timer (TimeCube Plus, red model with 5/10/20/25 min sides).
Since I'm only tracking my time at home, the categories are: gaming, tv/movies, music instrument, foreign language, exercise (that I can do indoors, such as weight training or flexibility: yoga, stretching), computer (email, my time right now on HN, general web surfing... anything not work related), and reading.
I'm not trying to account for house cleaning, sleeping, any outdoor activity, cooking, working, etc. I just want to get a better idea of how I spend my "free" time at home, and maybe make some changes after gathering at least 3 months of data.
Each second of every day is tracked, the timer goes on continuously and I just change the current activity.
Looking back at it at the end of the year is surprisingly a double-edged sword...
You are hit with a high knowing how much time you spent on work, working out, reading, socializing, etc..
But then you get hit with the downside, which is that you see how much time you wasted...
When you realize how much time gets spent on gaming, going to the store or even changing your clothed (!!!) you start looking at your time very differently.
If anyone has any questions or wants to know something I would be glad to be of use..
As for the sanity of it, it just becomes a habit like any other, e.g. you check for your keys when leaving your house, you just also check on the app the correct activity.
This sort of thing is what always stops me or is the problem I hit in categorising anything. Labels/tags are the usual solution, but that doesn't really work in this case, since you can't then say how you spent your time using a 365 days per 360 degree pie chart or whatever.
> Another cool feature of the way I was logging my data was that I could log more than one activity into a single time slot (walking and listening to a podcast is a classic). This means that the total time spent on all activities sums up to more than 365 days - you can see this as 'extra days' on the plot above. Turns out that this year, I had 395 surplus hours or 16.5 surplus days. I hope I didn't spend them on human function.
I can’t imagine doing this manually in a spreadsheet.
I did something similar -- I logged the activities on the world's largest supercomputer (that I have access to) every hour throughout the year 2020.
I logged information such as:
-- Who is logged in (the output of w command)
-- What processes are running and the overall system load (top and ps aux)
-- What is the state of memory and disk
-- What is the state of job scheduler
I have the data now and very excited about processing it in the coming weeks. I plan to anonymize and publish the data and the process I employed to collect it.
At least when I was a poor newly graduated boy suddenly having a salary but not much left at the end of the month, tracking everything for one month made it clear where the money went. So instead of acting on feelings I could act on data.
Robert Shields was best known for writing a diary of 37.5 million words, which chronicled every five minutes of his life from 1972 until a stroke disabled him in 1997.
15 minutes? The author must be really disciplined, also the logging process must be short and efficient.
Any thoughts on this?
Maybe it's just me but reading blogs is one of my biggest source of procrastination.
And holy cow, 3:25h per day socialising? How?
I would call this fake news, but then again, you did just create an activity tracker so.. I'm jealous.
Idle is my most important state of mind. Daydreaming. Suddenly some ideas pop into my mind. It is almost Zen like. Without being idle no focussed work. It fuels my work.