Since the start of this year, I’ve been tracking my time. The way I do this is in my journal, which has a weekly section, with 30-minute intervals running in boxed-paper down the pages. These columns start at 5am, and while some people use them to plan their week, I’ve been using my digital calendar for that and instead using these to track every half hour of my time. It’s not a perfect methodology: I’m not tracking every minute and in some cases I have to rely on memory. Usually I write in the thing that took the most time in that half-hour period (i.e. if something takes 16 minutes or longer, it becomes the dominant section). Otherwise I might count things across one section later in the day (for example, if it takes me 10 minutes each way to drive somewhere, that would be one “transit” block). Also, if something could count to two categories, I have to choose which one it would fit in. Normally this works out something like dinner being assigned to health (because I need to do it), but only for one half-hour timespan; any more time at “dinner” is probably a social thing.

In terms of choosing categories, I narrowed it down to 9, which felt the smallest I could get without being too general. These categories are:

• Sleep (which is counted in total for one day; so the end of one night and the start of the next)
• Health (food and exercise, mainly, as well as showering and so on)
• Work
• Creativity (for composing and performing, separate to work although there is some overlap)
• Play (for things where I’m watching a movie, reading a book, or even sightseeing)
• Social
• Wasted Time (for all the time I while away on my phone pointlessly)
• Chores
• Transit

And the first six months pie chart is:

If that’s a little confusing, let’s break each category down by their average number of hours per day.

Sleep: Average of 8.6; highest in April (8.9), lowest in June (8.4). Overall, very healthy numbers. I was quite sick in April which is why it jumps up to almost 9 hours on average, and in June I was travelling, and didn’t get as much sleep as a result. Note that sleep is pretty much my best estimates, and I track it more closely through a Garmin.

Health: Average of 4.2; high in Jan/Feb (4.9), low in April (3.5). I was training hard for a Half Marathon from January, which started well and those runs increased the average time. In the second quarter of the year, particularly April when I was very sick, this dropped off significantly. P.S. I’m a lot better now, but it was really unpleasant at the time.

Work: Average of 3.4; high in April (5.0), low in January (2.2). In April, even though I was sick, I had to go hard to get the music festival up and running, which meant a lot of long days particularly towards the end of the month once I was better. January is lower because of coming off the New Year Holiday. The average of 3.4 doesn’t sound like much, but remember that is including all weekends and holidays as well. I also track the breakdown of my work in a separate document, which is another blog post in itself.

Creativity: Average of 0.5; high in February (1.1), low in June (0.3). This is one I was really trying to improve this year, aiming for one piece a year. Once April came and I got really sick, this dropped off significantly. I expect it to go back up in the second half of the year as I start working more on PhD work.

Play: Average of 3.5; high in March (4.5), low in April (2.0). This is an OK number, I think I would like to see some of it move across to Creativity, but I don’t feel bad about this either. I would rather be doing something with my time, than nothing, which is the point of this category.

Social: Average of 1.3; high in June (2.0), low in February (0.4). This is a number I’d like to see go up as well. It was lower when I was in Bali, because I wasn’t seeing many people socially and didn’t stay in touch as much as I’d like. But remember again this is a daily average, and I think generally it is quite hard to be social during the week when we have to work. I think with that in mind 1-2 hours daily average is actually quite good.

Wasted Time: Average of 1.2; high in January (1.6), low in June (0.5). This was one of the reasons I started tracking my time, and it’s great to see the numbers come down, cutting an hour daily of wasted time. Generally this was time spent on my phone or surfing the web and not being deliberate with my time in choosing another category.

Chores: Average of 0.5; high in April (1.1), low in February/March (0.2). It really does show how privileged a Westerner can be in Bali, where the chore number is so much lower. There someone cleaned my room included in the cost, and same with clothes washing and so on. April’s time is a little inflated, as I had to unpack and get back into life in Australia. This number is probably slightly lower than it should be as there’s some things that are hard to quantify in here: for example, cleaning up after dinner might not take long for me and so it gets included in other categories. So maybe these numbers are slightly lower than the actual as a result.

Transit: Average of 0.8; high in June (1.7), low in February (0.0). Again, February I was deep in Fieldwork in Bali and not travelling much, and often working from the one place without a commute, whereas in June I was travelling in Europe which meant a lot of time on trains and so on. In general, for transit I would sometimes count it towards something else where appropriate: so a long-haul flight isn’t 24 hours, but just a few because once I’m on the flight I’m watching movies and eating and sleeping, which get counted to those categories.

Overall, this has been a good experiment and I’m happy with the accountability it provides me. I’m a bit of a stats junkie and it’s fun to see the numbers change with circumstance, and to give me something to aim for. I’m looking forward to comparing this to the end of the year. If you have any suggestions, please do send them through.