At the beginning of 2023, I decided to track my time usage hourly. I was inspired by this reddit post that also provided me with a really useful template.
The original types of activities weren’t fit for my lifestyle so I adapted them to my own:
To be honest, I rarely spend a whole hour focused on one thing only, so most of the time, especially when I had forgotten to track it on the same day, I had to resort to an approximation.
The Waste category contains all the moments where I felt I was, well, wasting time. One of the major flaws of this method is the majority of my waste happens in 5/10 minutes intervals, mostly spent mindlessly scrolling through the internet. To compensate for that I usually slipped one or two Wastes throughout the day.
Health and Travel was sort of a one size fits all for other things that I was doing but not for enough time to justify their own category. This includes going to the gym, taking the bus or traveling, cleaning my house…
Sleep, School and Music are quite self-explanatory. The difference between Productive and Relaxation/Leisure ended up becoming such a fine line that sometimes I ended up distributing them somewhat evenly.
If I could do it again, I would group Family and Friends in the same category, since most of the time they were interchangeable and made the final results more confusing. In retrospect, I would also remove the Dating/Partner category since it barely got any use (I guess I was too optimistic at the beginning of the year).
This template also included a mood tracker that I began using but quickly abandoned. I now regret that, since it was not much of a chore once I was already filling my hours every night, and that information now seems more valuable to me, especially when combined with the time tracker.
Now to the actual data:
That is an example of how it looks for the first two months. Just from a glance, one can see that there are some interesting patterns. Luckily, this template also includes a Data Analysis section that lays it all out in a much more useful format.
Most of the conclusions I extracted from this little experiment were things I already knew, but felt good (or rather bad) to have the data confirm them.
For example, in all of the graphics is easy to see that from midnight onwards I was spending most of my time on Waste. Also, especially during vacation months, the first hours of the day appear mostly red. I’m pretty sure that if I kept track of the mood data, there would be some kind of correlation. I would also be interested to keep track of how smoking weed affects both my time usage and mood, but I´m afraid I am just gonna verify what I intuitively know.
For me personally, the key takeaway from all this is that I am way off on being the best version of myself. Knowing that I am actively wasting 12% (!¡) of my life is at the very least concerning. Don´t get me wrong, I am a happy person in general and I am not missing any of my responsibilities, but to be honest, it makes me feel a little miserable knowing that I am the one slowing myself down. It is important to remark that I did not have a strict routine this year (contrary to most of my life) and it was the first time in my life not living in my parent’s house.
I am not planning to redo the experiment anytime soon, since I already know what I can do to improve my results. Maybe at some point in the future, it could be interesting to compare, especially if I end up working a full-time job since I believe that can make my easily make me lose control of my time.