Night Guy and Morning Guy

Visual comparison of two life-periods.

Timetracking
Reflection
Author

Vadym Yudenko

Published

December 12, 2024

2019-2020

In 2020 was my first attempt at time tracking. I have made some observations from that experience at the time. Then, as I have gained data analysis and visualization skills, I, again, have revisited my data in 2023 and came to some other conclusions (read about it here). In late 2024, I find myself revisiting the data yet again… because there is more data!

2022-2024

After a year-long hiatus, I have resumed tracking my time in 2022. This time there were no goals as to how much time has to be spent on any activity, but rather I used it as a tool for reflection1. Overall the approach and categories (activities) were the same, except now instead of Japanese there were even more studying, and new categories Toastmasters, Work and Piano.

  • 1 This deserves a post of it’s own.

    • 2020 vs 2023

    Despite a 2 year difference, these look almost the same—lotsa sleeping, studying and everything else. In 2020 there were days when I went to bed super late, in 2022-2023 they became habitual. Also, hours of sleep are visibly lower on the right, than on the left. In 2020 I socialized throughout the day, whereas in 2022-2023 it is concentrated in the evening—studies and work have ousted them.

    2022-2024 was an extremely stressful and rewarding year. I have learned and achieved in this year more than in 4 years combined, I’d wake up and study, then rest a bit, then study again. There were burnouts, and added pressure because of power outages and war in general. Yet, when you look at the percentages… my life hasn’t changed much.

    If you add Japanese and university study time from 2019-2020, you’d have roughly the same average as in 2023. Had a more active social life , but did less sports in 2023. But the most striking difference is with sleep, or lack thereof, in 2023.

    Morning guy

    Way back in 2020 one of the goals with time tracking was to get better at mornings. I would spent hours on my phone and not get anything done. As you can see from the sankey plot, I’ve been quite successful!

    The worst scenario is Sleep -> Miscellaneous -> Miscellaneous -> Miscellaneous , which is probably me laying in bed, engaging in brain-rot activity. Sleep -> Miscellaneous -> Miscellaneous -> Food is better, and Sleep -> Miscellaneous -> Food is much better. There are days when I’d go for a morning run or do morning exercises (Sleep -> Miscellaneous -> Sport and Sleep -> Sport). Looking at it makes me proud of my younger self, and displeased with older self.

    In 2022-2023 I have been much lazier and it would take me much longer to wake up. See the heatmap for 2023 and how inconsistent my sleeping schedule was, add to that that a lack of sleep on most days and that’s a recipe for a bad morning.

    Don’t think that this Miscellaneous -> Miscellaneous -> Miscellaneous is only me procrastinating in bed. It is very likely this is what I’ve been doing, but because Miscellaneous is such a broad category. Many things like taking a shower, packing stuff, ironing clothes, cleaning the flat, or preping breakfast2, which I started doing more often in this period.

  • 2 Don’t confuse with eating breakfast, which comes under Food category :)

    • There is one person who is to blame for lazy morning, and it is…

    Night guy

    “I never get enough sleep. I stay up late at night, cause I’m Night Guy. Night Guy wants to stay up late. ‘What about getting up after five hours sleep?’ ‘Oh that’s Morning Guy’s problem. That’s not my problem, I’m Night Guy. I stay up as late as I want.’ So you get up in the morning, you’re exhausted, groggy… ‘oooh I hate that Night Guy!’ See, Night Guy always [messes up] Morning Guy. There’s nothing Morning Guy can do. The only thing Morning Guy can do is try and oversleep often enough so that Day Guy loses his job and Night Guy has no money to go out anymore.”

    – Jerry Seinfeld

    The one messing up morning guy, the one partying (supposedly), the carefree one. In 2020 he knew his place, he was tame. Either chilling before going to bed (Miscellaneous -> Miscellaneous -> Sleep) or studying, preparing and going to bed (Japanese -> Miscellaneous -> Sleep). Sometimes he’d waste some time, but only for 20 minutes before realizing it is time to stop.

    Night guy of 2023 realized that wasting time is better in a good company. See how the share of social increased right before going to bed. In reality partying was mostly late-night conversations with fellow students about life, studies and stuff. Other than that Night guy of 2023 has been studying and chilling before sleep, much like the younger version of himself.

    Okay, we have seen WHAT were these 2 guys doing. Now about WHEN they were doing it. The plot below shows percentage of wake up (left) and bedtime (right) times for 2 periods. It is clear that going to bed earlier is (at least visually) associated with earlier wake-up time.

    Would be curious to look into a how variation in bedtime affect the variation in wake-up time. Notice how in 2023 wake-up times are heavily centered around 08:00, while bedtime is all over the place from 00:00 to 04:00! And the opposite for 2020, bedtime is centered around 00:00, and wake-up time has a bigger spread from as early as 04:00 to 10:00.

    Instead of conclusion

    Deep inside I expected to see a different picture. To see how better my time management skill got, how I’ve been more active, and more socially engaged. I have become more active, socially, too! This came at a cost of, among other things, healthy sleeping schedule and a reduced physical activity. Sounds like a typical student life.

    R version 4.3.0 (2023-04-21 ucrt)
Platform: x86_64-w64-mingw32/x64 (64-bit)
Running under: Windows 11 x64 (build 22631)

Matrix products: default


locale:
[1] LC_COLLATE=English_United States.utf8 
[2] LC_CTYPE=English_United States.utf8   
[3] LC_MONETARY=English_United States.utf8
[4] LC_NUMERIC=C                          
[5] LC_TIME=English_United States.utf8    

time zone: GMT+3
tzcode source: internal

attached base packages:
[1] grid      stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods  
[8] base     

other attached packages:
 [1] patchwork_1.2.0    DT_0.33            RColorBrewer_1.1-3 fontawesome_0.5.2 
 [5] knitr_1.46         glue_1.7.0         ggiraph_0.8.10     scales_1.3.0      
 [9] plotly_4.10.4      reshape2_1.4.4     transformr_0.1.5   showtext_0.9-7    
[13] showtextdb_3.0     sysfonts_0.8.9     ggnewscale_0.4.10  gganimate_1.0.9   
[17] ggthemes_5.1.0     ggtext_0.1.2       ggExtra_0.10.1     lubridate_1.9.3   
[21] forcats_1.0.0      stringr_1.5.1      dplyr_1.1.4        purrr_1.0.2       
[25] readr_2.1.5        tidyr_1.3.1        tibble_3.2.1       ggplot2_3.5.1     
[29] tidyverse_2.0.0    gt_0.10.1          stargazer_5.2.3   

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
 [1] DBI_1.2.2          rlang_1.1.3        magrittr_2.0.3     e1071_1.7-14      
 [5] compiler_4.3.0     systemfonts_1.1.0  vctrs_0.6.5        pkgconfig_2.0.3   
 [9] crayon_1.5.2       fastmap_1.2.0      labeling_0.4.3     utf8_1.2.4        
[13] promises_1.3.0     rmarkdown_2.27     markdown_1.12      tzdb_0.4.0        
[17] bit_4.0.5          xfun_0.44          cachem_1.1.0       jsonlite_1.8.8    
[21] progress_1.2.3     later_1.3.2        uuid_1.2-0         tweenr_2.0.3      
[25] parallel_4.3.0     prettyunits_1.2.0  R6_2.5.1           bslib_0.7.0       
[29] stringi_1.8.4      jquerylib_0.1.4    Rcpp_1.0.12        httpuv_1.6.15     
[33] timechange_0.3.0   tidyselect_1.2.1   rstudioapi_0.16.0  yaml_2.3.8        
[37] miniUI_0.1.1.1     curl_5.2.1         plyr_1.8.9         shiny_1.8.1.1     
[41] withr_3.0.0        evaluate_0.23      sf_1.0-16          units_0.8-5       
[45] proxy_0.4-27       xml2_1.3.6         lpSolve_5.6.20     pillar_1.9.0      
[49] KernSmooth_2.23-20 generics_0.1.3     vroom_1.6.5        hms_1.1.3         
[53] commonmark_1.9.1   munsell_0.5.1      xtable_1.8-4       class_7.3-21      
[57] lazyeval_0.2.2     tools_4.3.0        data.table_1.15.4  crosstalk_1.2.1   
[61] colorspace_2.1-0   cli_3.6.2          fansi_1.0.6        viridisLite_0.4.2 
[65] gtable_0.3.5       sass_0.4.9         digest_0.6.35      classInt_0.4-10   
[69] gifski_1.12.0-2    htmlwidgets_1.6.4  farver_2.1.2       htmltools_0.5.8.1 
[73] lifecycle_1.0.4    httr_1.4.7         mime_0.12          gridtext_0.1.5    
[77] bit64_4.0.5