I am a crazy person who keeps minute-by-minute records of how I spend my time. It can be cumbersome at times, but I’ve found this information to be a powerful tool. The data allows me to identify where I exercise poor time management, or spend too much time playing video games or watching television, and correct those behaviors. While the act of collecting time stamps can produce awkward situations (think dates), I only spend maybe 20-30 minutes tracking myself on an average day. I think of the time I spend in tracking myself as an investment that helps me better manage my time in the future.

But I don’t want this blog to focus solely on the benefits on measuring your minute-by-minute time usage, or other dimensions of your life. After all, the years data that I’ve collected on myself is this fascinating residue – one that I’m planning on transforming into all kinds of visuals and diagrams (which I’m hoping will compose about 50%-75% of this blog). For the first post, I’ve visualized how I spent my time in August of 2017, using data on my personal activities that I’ve maintained since late 2013:

for high resolution, click here: (August 2017)

The data. I track of this information daily, dedicating maybe 20-30 minutes between taking notes and transferring them to an Excel Spreadsheet. I’ve been doing this since 2013, when I decided I needed to take control of my time. I had just entered graduate school, and I needed a way to track how much time I sank into my work load vs how much time I sank into less-productive (but more mental-health oriented) activities like playing video games and reading for leisure. I started loosely tracking a couple of different activity types: Reading, writing, television, sleep, walks, exercise, errands, and housework. I designed some planners in Word, and used them to keep track of what I was doing during the day. I would later input this information to a Spreadsheet.

Since then, my time tracking has evolved somewhat. Not only have I condensed more information onto the page, I track more categories – podcasts & audio books, online video, building & crafts, coding, and visualization/design. I also added a bar where I keep relative track of my location (blurred out in this image – I don’t want you to use this info to hunt me):

I’m not doing anything revolutionary – you could do this, too. While the process of gathering this data can be cumbersome (perhaps apart from fitness data thanks to wearables like Fitbit), if you wanted to start employing a time-management strategy like this one, you don’t need to go to the same level of detail that I do to maintain your records. You only need to keep track of what’s important to you, and the things that you want to change about yourself. Do you watch too much TV or play too many video games? Keep track of the number of minutes that you do either, punch the data into Excel, make a chart, and try to manage the time you spend on those activities down. Do you want to reach a goal, maybe write more, spend more time on your crafts or developing certain skills? Keep track of the amount of time you spend writing, practicing those skills, or researching and try to manage it up. All you need is a clock or a piece of paper. Or you can use a timestamp application on your cellphone, which is how I currently keep track of time.

I pose this question to you, if you kept track of the details on how you spend your life, what would you choose to track? How would that help you meet your goals?

The diagram. The diagram is what’s called a Gantt chart, and it shows how I’m spending portions of my day. Each day is represented by a light gray bar, and each tracked activity appears as a colored block. You can see the key for more information.

I like this format because it bears a similarity to the planners that I use to track my activities (see above). You can visually distinguish between week days and weekends – green blocks represent work projects, so days with large green segments are days where I’m at work. I think I also spot a hangover on the 13th – you can tell because the sleep block runs later than usual, and I don’t have a lot of activities in the morning – which means that I was probably in bad shape. Also, I went to a concert the night before that came with a $70 price tag for booze (but that’s insider information).

There are parts of this format that I don’t like – the bars are not particularly descriptive. In this chart, you can’t tell the difference between going for a walk or working out, or between watching TV, playing video games, listening to podcasts, reading for leisure, or watching film. While I don’t want to disclose too much about how I spend my time, I don’t think it would be the end of the world if this graph showed the difference between work meetings, coding work, and visualization work. And when I come up with the next iteration, that’s a problem I want to try and solve.

Also, it wouldn’t hurt to include the day of the week, even though the work segments make it pretty easy to figure out.

Thank You. Thanks for taking the time to read this blog. I’m looking to update it once or twice a month with new visualizations and information about self-quantification, so if you liked this content, please take a moment to favorite or follow this blog post.