I logged my activities at 15-minute intervals for the whole year

I am always baffled how sad this extreme focus into productivity makes me.<p>If you discovered you were going to die in a year, would you continue to spend all your time being &quot;productive&quot;? I figure almost everyone would shift all their focus on doing things that &quot;really matter&quot;.<p>Sadly I believe the world managed to make us feel guilty when we&#x27;re not doing something that makes someone else rich (majority of jobs).<p>I&#x27;m a pessimist so I&#x27;d probably get very sad at some real data telling me how many hours I have wasted making someone else money.

Everytime these come up, I am reminded how little time we have for extracurricular activities as parents (outside of things you&#x27;d do with the kids, e.g. hiking, swimming, etc)<p>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.<p>I suppose you gain perspective and over those years an ability to optimize for time :)

My usual plug for TagTime[0], which handles this in a slightly different (and in my view better) way: it stochastically tracks your time by randomly sampling times to ask you what you&#x27;re doing <i>right now</i>. Fair in expectation, timeless (no slacking off because you&#x27;ve just filled in the timesheet), accurately captures (on average) the cost of all the short phone calls and context switches.<p>It&#x27;s by the Beeminder people, but works on its own. A hacky pile of perl scripts. I&#x27;ve run it continuously for 8 years now.<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;tagtime&#x2F;TagTime" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;tagtime&#x2F;TagTime</a>

Y’know, do whatever works for you, but this kind of relentless focus on time management feels like it runs exactly the opposite of what I want in my life. Meaning, when I was younger I could focus on problems for long chunks of time. As I’ve gotten older and had to deal with work stress, kid stress, life stress, dozens of devices all pinging me with notifications, people demanding my attention constantly... the truth is I can barely make it 15 minutes without someone or something interrupting me. I had this jerk client for a brief while - he was on monthly retainer, but wanted this kind of minute-by-minute granularity of tracking my time. It was the kind of thing that finally put me over the edge against this kind of relentless optimization because all it was doing was <i>wasting my time</i> tracking time rather than actually <i>doing the bloody work</i>. So hey, if tracking your life in 15 minute increments gives you what you need, great, but I personally am working on how to build long increments of time with greater focus.

&quot;Today’s society is no longer Foucault’s disciplinary world of hospitals, madhouses, prisons, barracks, and factories. It has long been replaced by another regime, namely a society of fitness studios, office towers, banks, airports, shopping malls, and genetic laboratories. Twenty-first-century society is no longer a disciplinary society, but rather an achievement society&quot;.<p>- Byung-Chul Han

Whoaa, amazing, I&#x27;ve been doing the same during the last 5 years, but I use an easier setup, I use an app, so I just have to click on buttons at the end of each activity.<p>&gt; Stay tuned to learn how do different activities influence my mood<p>I only started doing that this year, and I&#x27;m pissed off I didn&#x27;t start doing it earlier, as that&#x27;s where you can start doing correlation on your life and your activities.<p>If some people are interested I have described how I track my life here : <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.luap.info&#x2F;how-i-track-my-life.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.luap.info&#x2F;how-i-track-my-life.html</a>

For a long time I&#x27;ve wanted to create an Android&#x2F;iOS app called &quot;Sample Me&quot; or something similar, for collecting exactly this kind of data about yourself. You design a survey with whatever data you want to collect, then the app gives you a notification at whatever interval you configure. A couple taps and you have a sample point about your life, which gets appended to a Google Sheet or similar, and maybe some in-app visualization of trends.<p>I&#x27;ll probably never actually get to it, but it would be perfect for a thing like this.

Awesome read!<p>I&#x27;ve been tracking all my time, also at a 15-minute resolution, for the past 24 months.<p>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.<p>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.

This person does it differently. He takes pic of everything timed<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;kaielvin.org&#x2F;tl&#x2F;t=1585396555000000" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;kaielvin.org&#x2F;tl&#x2F;t=1585396555000000</a>

Great article.<p>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.<p>I will use this article as inspiration for writing a blog post sometime.<p>Coincidentally, I also saw a Reddit post last night [2] with the original poster&#x27;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.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;qotoqot.com&#x2F;qbserve&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;qotoqot.com&#x2F;qbserve&#x2F;</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;dataisbeautiful&#x2F;comments&#x2F;kp3fcn&#x2F;a&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;dataisbeautiful&#x2F;comments&#x2F;kp3fcn&#x2F;a&#x2F;</a>

I&#x27;m not sure how much alcohol you drink - could be one beer &#x2F; glass of wine &#x2F; drink, or it could be multiple units - but for your health, I&#x27;d recommend that you take a 3 day break between intake.<p>Drinking for 3-7 consecutive days, is not good for your liver, even in smaller quantities.

I too did this in 2016, for about 3-4 months. Mine was a single excel sheet, 30 minutes each. S for Sleeping, W for Work, D Drive, F Food eating &amp; cooking, N for Bathing Cleaning etc, F for Fun, W for Time Waste. Simple conditional formatting. Last column counted the Ws Fs Ns &amp; all. Next Sheet had some bar charts. My job was in Excel, so it was easy to log data. I used to use an A6 size simple printout to mark things. It was fun while it lasted, but I thought it was too much work.<p>Now, as I learnt Google Apps Script, can use a simple HTML app, with GAS to easily log the hours or time slots.

This looks fun. As a consultant I&#x27;ve gotten used to tracking my time when I&#x27;m &quot;on the clock&quot;, and it&#x27;s not nearly as onerous as you might think, once you get in the habit. It&#x27;s cool that he used it as a technique to &quot;keep himself honest&quot; about how he spends his time, and effect positive change (even gaming himself to skew his activities in the direction he desires).<p>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&#x27;s getting close to plausible? Some you can already infer from various sensors &#x2F; devices (e.g. sleeping, walking, talking on the phone, even whether the call is with friends&#x2F;coworkers&#x2F;clients). More might be learnable through AI (maybe analyzing audio &#x2F; video feeds in a privacy-preserving manner)?

This sounds like a obvious question, but when do you log the data? Do you set a timer every 15 minutes? What about the time spent logging data every 15 minutes? Any complementary apps?

My wife has made tool for doing this on your IPhone. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;apps.apple.com&#x2F;us&#x2F;app&#x2F;take-control&#x2F;id1499424011" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;apps.apple.com&#x2F;us&#x2F;app&#x2F;take-control&#x2F;id1499424011</a><p>+ it is completely free, no ads, no nothing paid, not snooping your data<p>+ you don&#x27;t have to unlock your phone - you can just type what you are doing inside the notification itself &#x2F; choose from list of your usual activities

I started tracking my time in 15-minute intervals a little under a month ago, and I&#x27;ve also been surprised by how little effort it is.<p>I&#x27;ve not gone for breaking by day up into 15 minute chunks, instead I&#x27;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&#x27;m also not tracking <i>everything</i>, for example, showering. So I have a fair bit of missing time every day, which I&#x27;m aiming to get down to 2 hours or less a day.<p>I&#x27;ve already found myself using time more &quot;productively&quot; - preferring to do things which are tracked (like reading) over things which are not (like mindlessly browsing the internet).<p>There are a few key metrics I&#x27;m keeping an eye on:<p>- Average daily sleep deficit: `avg(8 - sleep hours)`<p>- Average daily work deficit: `avg(8 - work hours)` for work days<p>- Average daily missing time: `avg(24 - all hours)`<p>- Days since last day off work, not counting weekends<p>- Percentage of leisure hours: `avg(leisure hours &#x2F; (all hours - sleep hours))`<p>I&#x27;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.<p>I&#x27;ll likely expand the things I&#x27;m specifically monitoring as I get more data.

&gt; human function - the boring stuff: eating<p>I disagree on this one.<p>Eating can and on good days should be a pleasure. It can also be very social. Eating together is an ancient tradition. Breaking bread.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Yet a proper market with the flavors, the colors and variety it is a different experience.<p>I often feel happy once I have found a right cut of fish, I cant wait to get home, prepare it and eat it.<p>I am sad that in some countries and in some circles it is seen as a &quot;must do&#x2F;boring&quot;, instead of &quot;This is going to be delicious&quot;.<p>For some scarfing down a Granola bar and a protein milkshake is what eating has been reduced to.<p>Granted that would save a lot of time and people are different.<p>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 :( )<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Still even with old rations for 90 days straight the communal experience of sharing a meal was present.<p>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 &#x2F; wants to share.<p>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.

I am really really grateful I am not this kind of person. Not everything needs to be quantified and analyzed. I&#x27;m glad OP had fun with the exercise but this drive to amass data will only lead to human suffering and oppression down the line

I&#x27;m always in ave of these posts, of how people are able to log activities in these resolutions. I have really large problems tracking what I spend my hours at work on, and often resort to winging it.

Thanks for sharing--I&#x27;m reading Atomic Habits and have been thinking about tracking like this. It&#x27;s impressive that you stuck with it and inspiring.

I always liked logging my actions to see what&#x27;s really going on. I think the most common one I do every few months is tracking my diet for a few days to see what bad habits I&#x27;ve picked up and where I need to improve. The first time I did it I realized by protein intake was way too low and that&#x27;s why I wasn&#x27;t seeing improvements in working out. It also enlightens me into how sodium filled so much of the food I&#x27;m eating is and helps me plan around those.<p>Same goes with tracking time spent on &quot;human function&quot; 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&#x27;s almost like a game to make the boring stuff as efficient as possible. As I&#x27;ve added more steps to my daily routines, I&#x27;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&#x27;t do this and it boggles me.<p>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.

My experience with this type of tracking is that it makes me more thoughtful about my time. I used Numbers and it cloud-syncs to most of my devices, I prefer this over passive trackers.<p>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 &#x27;micro-interuptions&#x27;. 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&#x27;t actively have a plan to do something.<p>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.

An interesting self experiment in monitoring what you do.<p>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.<p>I haven&#x27;t done anything interesting with the data yet, beyond running basic &quot;is someone in the office and should I capture that&quot; detection.<p>I&#x27;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.

Well, that is impressive, this year I decided to track some daily data, but much more simple than this. It&#x27;s pretty much a Yes&#x2F;No activity X in that day, besides my weight, which is the exact number.<p>I&#x27;m also using Google Sheet and I&#x27;m quite curious if I will be able to keep doing it until the end of the year.

Fun and interesting read!<p>I&#x27;m doing a vastly scaled down time logging for 2021 - I want to understand how I use my time at home after work. I&#x27;m using a time tracker app, sometimes in conjunction with a pomodoro timer (TimeCube Plus, red model with 5&#x2F;10&#x2F;20&#x2F;25 min sides).<p>Since I&#x27;m only tracking my time at home, the categories are: gaming, tv&#x2F;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.<p>I&#x27;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 &quot;free&quot; time at home, and maybe make some changes after gathering at least 3 months of data.

This was very cool, I&#x27;d be curious to hear more about the logistics of logging this. I&#x27;m curious how they practically logged all of this and made sure not to drop time across different activities, busy days, etc. I feel like if I tried to do this I would end up losing track of a lot of time.

Interesting! I personally have used for the last 30 months the app called Time Tracker.<p>Each second of every day is tracked, the timer goes on continuously and I just change the current activity.<p>Looking back at it at the end of the year is surprisingly a double-edged sword...<p>You are hit with a high knowing how much time you spent on work, working out, reading, socializing, etc..<p>But then you get hit with the downside, which is that you see how much time you wasted...<p>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.<p>If anyone has any questions or wants to know something I would be glad to be of use..

I wouldn&#x27;t mind having this kind of data... But manual logging is something very painful to do at such intervals. In a parallel universe, one where we don&#x27;t have social media but mini drones the size of an orange, I imagine these drones would be floating around their owners and logging (locally!) all their activities (algorithms determine the best kind of action for every human activity (e.g., human sitting down with a book -&gt; reading... The drone could even attempt to read the book&#x27;s title and log it as well as metadata)).

Three things I always ask myself about any task: What am I doing that should not be done at all? What am I doing that someone else could do? What can only be done by me? Then do only things I can do.

Should &#x27;travel&#x27; really be a category? Won&#x27;t &#x27;time spent in buses&#x2F;cars&#x2F;planes etc&#x27;, unless driving them, always also be time spent &#x27;idle&#x27;, &#x27;procrastinating&#x27;, &#x27;culture&gt;books&#x27;, or one of the others?<p>This sort of thing is what always stops me or is the problem I hit in categorising anything. Labels&#x2F;tags are the usual solution, but that doesn&#x27;t really work in this case, since you can&#x27;t then say how you spent your time using a 365 days per 360 degree pie chart or whatever.

I just did this on paper for like 2 years. I like the sense of logging it, it just steer me in the right direction. And I&#x27;m fascinated how doing that digitally helps getting wonderful insights!

I also happened to time track my time this year, although in a more automatic (and less detailed) way. For that I used ActivityWatch on my personal laptop (which I use for all non-work related matters) in order to have an automatic way to track my time and, at least for me, figure out how much time I&#x27;m wasting on time wasters like social media, Youtube, Hacker News and so on. It was interesting to see the difference between the time I think I&#x27;m spending and the time I&#x27;m actually spending.

If you spend most of your time on a computer you could use “Timing 2”. I’ve got down to the second tracking of exactly what I did during my last job for around two years. Easy to sort by work-vs-fun. If I had used it on my personal laptop I’d have near 90% coverage of my life. Then tracking the rest would require less manual effort. Probably could semi-automate that too by building an app that polls you every 15m with a few quick-add entries.<p>I can’t imagine doing this manually in a spreadsheet.

Thank you for the post.<p>I did something similar -- I logged the activities on the world&#x27;s largest supercomputer (that I have access to) every hour throughout the year 2020.<p>I logged information such as:<p>-- Who is logged in (the output of w command)<p>-- What processes are running and the overall system load (top and ps aux)<p>-- What is the state of memory and disk<p>-- What is the state of job scheduler<p>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.

I just started doing this, but using 30-minute blocks, and fewer categories. &quot;Keep it simple.&quot; The goal is to make sure certain activities receive at least a minimum of attention, and others don&#x27;t exceed a maximum. The rest, you don&#x27;t need to schedule or track. A flexible system. Freedom alongside order. Open prairie just outside the city grid. Dreams amid plans.

I think it would be nice to try for a month, to see where time is spent. Maybe finding some surprises or things to tweak to move time around to what I really want.<p>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.

I am reminded of this guy: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Robert_Shields_(diarist)" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Robert_Shields_(diarist)</a><p>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.

I am using a pomodoro app (productivity challenge timer) and as a result track my time. The smartphone also tracks walking and running and I have recently started tracking sleep as well. It does 80% of the tracking automatically I guess. I also use habitica as a complementary tracking tool.

Most of the procrastination is on Wednesday. Do you work on weekends and take a day off on Wednesdays?

There was such a Russian scientist, biologist - Lyubishchev A.A. 1890-1972 y. He counted his personal time since the age of 25 years and all the rest life. About his system wrote russian writer Daniil Granin &quot;A strange life&quot;.

Ah, the lengths PhD people will go to to avoid doing their thesis... ah, the memories :)

Google&#x2F;Facebook and companies like the old &quot;Cambridge Analytica&quot; who buy their data, or similar data collection agencies, probably have this exact level of detail on pretty much everyone who owns a phone or computer.

I tried to do this but every 2 hours, or using wakatime for IDE. But even that seems too much and I dropped after about 3 months.<p>15 minutes? The author must be really disciplined, also the logging process must be short and efficient.

I enjoyed reading your article. And myself what to start track some parameter. I&#x27;m thinking of &quot;lines added into git&quot;, and make from them a little game eg draw a chart on a fridge.

That&#x27;s a lot of &#x27;focused work&#x27;! I doubt I can log the time I spend at work as focused-work... I have a feeling that low-focus work would dominate. Does anyone else feel the same?

Had to do this as a job site. Something to do with accounting. It was terrible, it felt like I had to justify being there in 15 min intervals. Thank god I was only there for a few days.

I do this as well. Mine is to track actuals against my schedule. Helps knowing what I should be doing. It&#x27;s just a habit now. It&#x27;s all on paper though, no digital aspect.

It&#x27;s terrifying to me that people are willing to store such insanely personal data unencrypted with organizations who, by law, are not permitted to keep it private.

&gt; I guess the lesson here is that when it comes to focused work, the 8-hour working day is an unattainable target and should not be used as a benchmark.<p>Any thoughts on this?

Any details on why reading blogs give +2 points while procrastination gives -4.<p>Maybe it&#x27;s just me but reading blogs is one of my biggest source of procrastination.

As someone who loves data and its interpretation, I enjoyed your colorful graphs a lot! Pretty cool to see life analyzed through data points.

Super interesting. Definitely a little crazy, but I&#x27;m glad you found the willpower to finish and share it.<p>And holy cow, 3:25h per day socialising? How?

All activities? anyone know what the limits were?

Only 5.3 days procrastinating ???<p>I would call this fake news, but then again, you did just create an activity tracker so.. I&#x27;m jealous.

Thanks for sharing this! I love the technique. I&#x27;m going to try it out and see for myself.

The GitHub-esc point system grid is a great brain hack. Really like this system

The fact that you logged 395 days in a year invalidates your entire dataset.

1.76 days idle? I&#x27;d call that impossible. How can you be busy the whole waking time? Sounds like burn out is creeping in.<p>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.

Makes me wonder how many days he had cumulatively recording this data...

this reminds me of the struggle with logging my billable hours as a consultant.. Ugh.. But HATS OFF. This data is interesting and beautifully presented!

Interesting. He was breaking his concentration every 15 minutes. Can only imagine how much he got done the whole year...

Where are all the lawyer jokes?

So, how long did you spend on all that logging, and could you not have used the time for something more productive or less stressful?