# What I learned traking my time for 6 months

At the beginning of 2023, I decided to track my time usage hourly. I was inspired by [this reddit post](https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/101hvnv/oc_i_tracked_every_hour_of_my_life_for_5_years/) that also provided me with a really useful [template](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1W79a98wLeuMjDbJuy0IYDeQYZSVaWjTUCPUpXj24MHs/edit#gid=0).

The original types of activities weren't fit for my lifestyle so I adapted them to my own:

![Categories](https://imgur.com/F6kg9Se.png)

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:

![Example](https://imgur.com/px7ttof.png)

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.

![Data Analysis](https://imgur.com/PBwjRkd.png)
![Data Analysis2](https://imgur.com/xvzbMsA.png)

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.