fitness

I decided to keep track of every minute of my day for a week and analyse the results. If you're like me you'd like to think that what you say is important to you is reflected by the amount of time you spend on it. But if you looked how most people spend their time it'd seem hanging on Facebook and such is most important to them. Thanks to knowing I'd have to report my week I kept I managed to keep myself on particularly good behavior. Yet, the results still embarrassed me.

Time groups

It’s useful to categorise your time into 4 groups on a scale or value. The goal is to spend less time on the two lower value groups and place that time on the two higher value activities.

• Negative value activities are those that don’t contribute to you life in any way. They’re a drain.
• Low value activities are those that are constructive, value-adding, but anyone could do them. Minimum-wage tasks. You’d be better off paying someone to do them so that you free up more time for higher value and higher earning activities.
• High value activities are those that generate a lot of value for yourself personally and/or other people. You job is likely high value since people are willing to pay you for the time you spend on this.
• High lifetime value activities are those that don’t show results immediately, but are beneficial to you long-term. Examples are exercising and educating yourself.

Report

Notes

• For this report I’ve rounded to the closest quarter-hour.
• I’m excluding the 62 hours I spent sleeping (Almost 9 hours per day). I’d really like to cut down on this.
• 12 hours were strangely not accounted for. I thought I was very diligent so I’m disappointed at this. That’s up to 10% of my waking time that kind of falls through the cracks.
• Time spent multitasking was tricky to categorize. When I cleaned I also listen to podcasts. When I prepared food I also spent time with girlfriend. When traveling I’d meditate.
• Should relaxing be high lifetime value? Sometimes it was difficult separating this from time spent with girlfriend.
• I really dislike needing to spend time eating. Yet should it also be high lifetime value since I need it to survive?
• I noticed I switched between tasks more than I’d like.
• One of the best benefits of this experiment was that for each activity I was forced to categorize it somehow and thereby get clarity on the actual value of it.

Last updated 24 February, 2017

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