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

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

#111

Post by dundercoder »

renewiltord wrote: post #103
DecayingOrganic wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll raise my head above the parapet and admit that I don't get it. How about just scheduling things? If you want to spend more time on things that matter, just pick a date and time, and get going. That said, perhaps the alluring part was gathering data on one's self.

Because Akrasia. I currently am supposed to be doing other things but I am spending it on HN.

akrasia akrasia /əˈkreɪzɪə , əˈkrasɪə / (also acrasia) ▸ noun [mass noun] mainly Philosophy the state of mind in which someone acts against their better judgement through weakness of will. – ORIGIN early 19th century : from Greek, from a- ‘without’ + kratos ‘power, strength’. The term is used especially with reference to Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics.

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

#112

Post by maria_weber23 »

Draiken wrote: post #49

I am always baffled how sad this extreme focus into productivity makes me. If you discovered you were going to die in a year, would you continue to spend all your time being "productive"? I figure almost everyone would shift all their focus on doing things that "really matter". Sadly I believe the world managed to make us feel guilty when we're not doing something that makes someone else rich (majority of jobs). I'm…

Tracking your time spent has nothing to do with productivity. It is simply data you may chose to act on or not.

If this person was out for optimizing income, tye6 would not have studied a PhD in the first place, because that's 6 years wasted, plus tuition on top of it.

You can your tracking to optimize for whatever variable you want to optimize. You could realize that you work too much and aim for working less. You could realize that you do social media too much and aim to do less of it, etc. It's up to you.

As for not making money. The world is, sadly highly biased towards rich people. If you are poor and happy (which is totally possible) you are still highly at risk that this state won't last. Without money, you are f*ed in this world. It's just the way it is. If you are dependent on income you are dependent on A LOT of things. The best you can generally do for your happiness is become income independent as fast as possible, which usually means to earn as much as possible as early as possible and then live from investments while focusing on everything that's not work.

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

#114

Post by 6equj5 »

barrucadu wrote: post #54
nyxtom wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you use an app for this, or do you just use the timer?

I'm manually noting down durations in timedot format ( https://hledger.org/hledger.html#timedot-format ) in a text file. For example, today's entry as of 18:32 is: 2021-01-03 leisure:anime ....................... leisure:social .. sleep 6.5h chores:foodprep . chores:regular . leisure:social ...... leisure:ttrpg:play .......... Each dot is 15 minutes, so I'm missing a bit of time today. Oh well. I think that having a…

Shameless plug: I wrote a little Python timer for Linux that works great with a dropdown terminal like Yakuake: https://github.com/qiolol/timerBeetle

I often use it for timed tasks, and it's faster than reaching for my phone or even opening a browser tab (and, unlike a Google or DDG timer, it doesn't keep ringing until you re-raise the browser window, find the tab, and silence it, which always annoyed me). : p

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

#115

Post by raunakdag »

radley wrote: post #105
haberman wrote: post #8

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…

I'm building an Apple app that does this and saves everything as a journal.

Do you have a waitlist? I want to sign up

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

#116

Post by smitop »

zufallsheld wrote: post #43
pmyteh wrote: post #30

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're doing right now . Fair in expectation, timeless (no slacking off because you've just filled in the timesheet), accurately captures (on average) the cost of all the short phone calls and context switches. It's by the Beeminder people,…

Does anyone know of a similar tool for windows?

Here's a list of implementations: http://doc.beeminder.com/tagtime (I also wrote a web implementation: https://ttw.smitop.com/)

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

#117

Post by IkmoIkmo »

haberman wrote: post #8

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…

I'd love this on an apple watch. Would be especially nice to combine with an NFC tag. e.g. when you brush your teeth, just hold your watch to the brush which has an NFC tag, then start brushing. That activity is now recorded somewhere.

It's really not a big deal to open an app, browse to the particular activity, and register it. But somehow in practice it is. It's another chore that I never really get around to doing consistently. And if you're not tracking data consistently, it's very quickly quite useless.

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

#119

Post by lmarcos »

nekopa wrote: post #47
xkeysc0re wrote: post #36

I am really really grateful I am not this kind of person. Not everything needs to be quantified and analyzed. I'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 don't understand this viewpoint. This type of data is being misused already. I think it would be a net positive for individuals to get their own data and use it for positive outcomes. It shouldn't be shared with the world at large, but when I've tracked certain info about myself, it has helped me immensely.

I also think that the data itself can be used for positive outcomes... The manual tracking though (every 15 min.) is the downside.

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

#120

Post by dtran »

Draiken wrote: post #49

I am always baffled how sad this extreme focus into productivity makes me. If you discovered you were going to die in a year, would you continue to spend all your time being "productive"? I figure almost everyone would shift all their focus on doing things that "really matter". Sadly I believe the world managed to make us feel guilty when we're not doing something that makes someone else rich (majority of jobs). I'm…

I think "being productive" vs. "time well spent" and "doing things that really matter" is a false dichotomy. It doesn't have to be this way. I know that's a statement from a position of privilege— not every has a job where they can feel like they are in a flow state while working, but do you have any side projects or hobbies where you feel both productive and feel like it's time well spent?

Coming to this pretty late, but I've been fascinated with the concept of flow recently, which researcher Mihaly Csikszentmihaly described as:

  “The best moments in our lives are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times . . . The best moments usually occur if a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile”
Again, not everyone is in a position to do this, but I think we should de-emphasize number of hours spent in "work mode" albeit inefficiently or without great focus or working on things that aren't super important and more time seeking deep focus and then time completely off to relax, recharge and let ideas background process/percolate.
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