Timing update

I said last week that I was going to track all my time for the week and see what insight I could get from it. As it turns out, a little bit, but not as much as I hoped. Mostly things were as expected, but there was still enough to be useful.

My biggest chunk of time was, as you would hope, sleep. I clocked 51.5 hours, for an average of 7.5 hours per night. After that was 32 hours of time tracked with no description, followed by 24.6 hours with friends, 23 hours of miscellaneous junk and 23 hours of house-related activities. That big chunk of "no description" time is me forgetting to reset the timer sometimes, but annoyingly means the data isn't quite as complete as I'd like. I suspect that's just a habitual thing that would become easier with time.

The rest roughly lines up with my expectations: I had friends visiting from out of town for the week, so I spent a fair bit of time with them, though I wouldn't have realised how much without the timer. I was also looking for a new housemate, which ate up those 23 house-related hours over the weekend. Sleep was roughly what I thought, but I would have liked a little more.

The miscellaneous time is pretty interesting though. I marked as miscellaneous anything that wasn't useful for anything. I didn't include, for example, things like showering or shopping (they generally went under "maintenance"), or fun stuff ("fun" or "friends", depending), so in theory the miscellaneous category is purely dead time. I'm sure some of it could have been recategorised if I was trying harder, but even so there's basically a part-time job worth of screwing around in there.

To an extent I expected to find a lot of miscellaneous time (it was, in a sense, the point). I want to find out what happens if I start squeezing that time. Does it turn into fun time? Work time? Or maybe there is some inevitable necessity for a certain amount of useless time. Whatever it turns out to be, the answer seems worth finding out.

For that reason and because I want to see what it looks like with more complete data, I think it's worth continuing. I also didn't find it very onerous once I got into the swing of it. The only somewhat annoying thing is tracking when I go to sleep, which I sometimes forget because I'm nearly asleep when it happens. So I'll try to keep this up until the end of April and I'll write an update again after that, where I see if the usefulness equation has changed with more data.