11–20 of 321 posts
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.
Everytime these come up, I am reminded how little time we have for extracurricular activities as parents (outside of things you'd do with the kids, e.g. hiking, swimming, etc) 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. I suppose you gain perspective and over those years an abi…
> Everytime these come up, I am reminded how little time we have for extracurricular activities as parents This is interesting, because it's only a problem for non-rich people. Rich people solve this with nannies and babysitters and other home staff to take care of chores and child-rearing so they have more time for work or leisure activities. It really puts a point on the whole "everyone has 24 hours in a day, but n…
Great point. Further driven by the pandemic
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Everytime these come up, I am reminded how little time we have for extracurricular activities as parents This is interesting, because it's only a problem for non-rich people. Rich people solve this with nannies and babysitters and other home staff to take care of chores and child-rearing so they have more time for work or leisure activities. It really puts a point on the whole "everyone has 24 hours in a day, but n…
Isn't paying someone else to raise your children... not raising children? It's like comparing a bank with actual gold in a vault and many expensive physical security measures with someone who owns a futures contract with no delivery.
But you can have someone clean your flat/house, someone do the gardening, someone doing your taxes. Have someone cook for you. And thus have more time for your kids and still have more free time.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Everytime these come up, I am reminded how little time we have for extracurricular activities as parents This is interesting, because it's only a problem for non-rich people. Rich people solve this with nannies and babysitters and other home staff to take care of chores and child-rearing so they have more time for work or leisure activities. It really puts a point on the whole "everyone has 24 hours in a day, but n…
Isn't paying someone else to raise your children... not raising children? It's like comparing a bank with actual gold in a vault and many expensive physical security measures with someone who owns a futures contract with no delivery.
For a long time I've wanted to create an Android/iOS app called "Sample Me" 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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Everytime these come up, I am reminded how little time we have for extracurricular activities as parents This is interesting, because it's only a problem for non-rich people. Rich people solve this with nannies and babysitters and other home staff to take care of chores and child-rearing so they have more time for work or leisure activities. It really puts a point on the whole "everyone has 24 hours in a day, but n…
> It really puts a point on the whole "everyone has 24 hours in a day, but not everyone's 24 hours are equal". Great point. Further driven by the pandemic
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 'micro-interuptions'. 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't actively have a plan to do something.
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.
Awesome read! I've been tracking all my time, also at a 15-minute resolution, for the past 24 months. 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. I see that you used Google Sheets for time tracking.…