{"id":4518,"date":"2019-06-14T03:45:45","date_gmt":"2019-06-14T08:45:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.hectic-dad.com\/hectic-dad\/?p=4518"},"modified":"2019-06-06T14:35:06","modified_gmt":"2019-06-06T19:35:06","slug":"quantified-life-time-tracking","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hectic-dad.com\/hectic-dad\/quantified-life-time-tracking\/","title":{"rendered":"Quantified Life – Time Tracking"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I recently wrote the introduction to this series on My Quantified Life<\/a><\/em>. If you haven\u2019t read it yet, you ought to pop over there, read that post and then come back. I\u2019ll wait\u2026\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While my tracking journey started with health and exercise-related items, the past few years I\u2019ve gotten even more success from tracking how I\u2019m using my time. In a lot of ways, time is like nutrition. Until you actually track it and codify where the calories are coming from, you\u2019re working from a set of assumptions that are not based in reality. Tracking all<\/strong>\u00a0the calories you consume, just for a couple of days, can be eye-opening. You suddenly realize that handful of nuts is 400, essentially empty, calories. It\u2019s possible to change your eating habits after a very short time tracking what you eat.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Time is a bit different, since very few people have much consistency to their days. I found that I needed to track about two weeks worth of time before I was able to gather enough data to be useful. When I started my time tracking, I did it on paper. I created a gridded form with a column for each day of the week and a row for 30 minute increments for the day. I also set a timer to go off every 30 minutes. When the timer went off, I would take a couple of seconds and write down what I had done during the past half hour.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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That systems worked ok, but I discovered I had too many different types of things I was doing. I needed some sort of structure to organize the data. I tried all sorts of different approaches, but eventually settled on categorizing what I was doing into the five Areas of Focus<\/a><\/em>\u00a0that I\u2019m still using:\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n