A friend asked me what I achieved in 2017 in December. As someone who takes pride in not wasting time, I was surprised at how little I had to show for. Sure, I moved to Seattle, started a job after grad school and finally exercised regularly, but I couldn’t fully describe how I spent 11.5 months.

I started thinking of ways I can be accountable for my time. I wanted a system where I can reflect back on how I spent my time, and if that was spent doing what I really wanted to do and if it’s helping me achieve my long-term goals.

Tools

Looking ahead: Calendar

For personal tasks or goals, I pick the date that I’d like to see it get done by and add that to my calendar. I have created a new label or category with my Google Calendar for these, so I can hide or show them without affecting my other calendars.

If I am unable to meet this, I have to deliberately move the calendar entry, which gives me immediate feedback for nothing prioritizing correctly. I unfortunately don’t know how to track moves well and somehow reflect on that.

Looking behind: Journaling on Google Docs

To know what I’m doing day to day, I’m currently maintaining a Google Doc titled “Task Log.” A typical entry for one day looks something like:

7-6-2019, Sat
+ Met Scott over brunch #Social
- Ended up spending 4 hours looking for furniture to buy
* Had to deal with a page as on-call for #Work

7-5-2019, Fri
...

+ is for time spent well, on a goal or something you consider positive. - is time lost, wasted or put into something that should be avoided. * is for everything else, simply highlighting how time was spent. For me, the distribution is a bell curve, with about 75% with *, but I aim to increase +.

I use the bullets with the intention of quickly glancing whether there are more + or - bullets while reviewing what I did during a certain period. Tags are great for searching and counting instances, especially if it’s a year-end goal.

What didn’t make the cut

I looked for task management tools that give me even more accurate break-down of time spent. The closest I got to what I wanted was Asana + tmetric integration. Asana to track all the tasks and tmetric to break down time spent (at a granularity that was overkill). There are other “to-do” apps and time-tracking tools, really designed with freelancers in mind.

None of these really work for me because of the free flowing nature of the things that come up everyday that I would like to record. I’ll need a specific task to count time spent for it to show up in any of these apps. I find this very restrictive in the expressiveness of a document. Even if I were to create tasks like “Social” to keep track of total time spent, I can’t really see what I REALLY did in a reverse chronological order or a calendar-like view for that particular task. Also finding tasks from a huge list is a lot is harder than typing 3 lines.

I’d love to just make an app myself, if there are users out there for something like this. :)

Analyzing time spent

I’d like to ideally do this every quarter: look at the Task Log for the last 3 months and write a summary for how time was spent each month using a similar bullet system.

2019

Jan
+ Spent 3/4 weekends fully on a trip or meetings friends: Grad School, UG and Work friends
* After-work time was spent reading nonfiction, though I was distracted and only read 2 books
- House moving overhead was a full weekend and 7 days after work

Feb
...

This should help aggregate how time was spent, group together activities that are recurring, or progress made towards long term goals. This helps me extract patterns and isolate behaviors. For example, if my goal for the year is to be social, this helps me identify how many hours I spent talking to others and how many people did I meet.

At the end of the year, you can review the 12 monthly summaries to further extract information about how the year was spent and what were some of the achievements. I’m hoping this could help answer more questions about directions in the future.