2020
Mesmerizing, isn’t it? The chaos and apparent randomness of all these colors. Upon closer inspection you might notice the some recurring patterns. That sea of blue at the bottom is Sleep, a swarm of golden dots right above is breakfast (Food), and above are other daily activities. You are looking at my 2020.
2019-2020 was my sophomore year at university, where I (should) have studied entrepreneurial studies. But majority of my time was preoccupied with extracurricular activities, mainly, studying Japanese.
I’ve found out about time-tracking and decided to give it a try. Some thought were given to the number of categories (what to track) and the frequency of tracking (how to track). With 13 categories that sufficiently capture my life and 72 20-minute intervals I was set up to track some time.
Lessons
You have only 16 hours in a day
Sorry, Arnold, but you don’t have 24 hours to use. While I appreciate the premise of the quote and it’s catchy, motivating nature, it is false and I know just by how much!
My younger self was easily swayed by such simple and inspiring quotes, they made me wanna get out there and do great things! When I started time tracking, I set goals on how much hours I wanted to spend per each category. For example, I needed to spend 1000 hours learning Japanese by December 2020, clock at least 5 hours/week of Sports to stay fit, accumulate no less than 10 hours/week of socializing before I go crazy.
After a couple of weeks I was behind on many of my goals. Upon closer inspection I realized that I failed to account for sleep.
You don’t even have 16 hours in a day
Yes! Not only sleep was taking too much time, but also miscellaneous—an umbrella category for non-productive, but necessary parts of life. Brushing teeth and taking a shower, doing groceries and laundry, cleaning a room and ironing a shirt, doing a medical check-up, waiting in a queue (!) are some of the activities that happen daily and there are no escaping them. Watching YouTube, reading social media and other such activities were not given a category of their own, they, too, fall under miscellaneous1.
1 Aster Hu’s blog on tracking of spare time has a great descriptions of what comprises this category.
There is no structure to it, it is chaotic and permeates every day. So much of my 2020 was occupied with miscellaneous things it is scary—almost 6 hours of my day went towards this category! I didn’t think I spent too much time on social media and YouTube, but looking back I absolutely did!
Time is not found, it is made
If you considering learning a new skill, be ready to sacrifice the time needed to learn this skill from some other activity you’ve been doing.
In my case, I’ve sacrificed my university studies to acquire Japanese.
In Ukraine an emergency lockdown was declared on March 20, 2020. Interestingly how with it my diligent studying ended—average hours spent studying never came back to pre-pandemic level.
Of course, Covid played a role—suddenly there was no need to commute to and fro university, be present and active during online classes—but I’ve already been steadily increasing my time with the target language. By that time I’ve already obtained N4 (A2) and knew that to reach N3 and above (B1+), much more hours had to be spent with the language. For Japanese I needed at least 1000 hours to pass N3 in December 2020. To get these 1000 hours I have sacrificed my main studies in the university.
Hindsight 20/20
Could I have still gotten these 1000 hours without sacrificing arguably important part of life? Absolutely! I could spend every waking hour working/studying, have food brought to me, replace social life with daily work meetings—what a wicked thought—and never see the light of day! But what a miserable life that would be!
Looking back, I could have spent less time scrolling feed in the morning and before bed, watching videos after school, and instead spend more time with friends and family, doing sports and studying Japanese.
Goals
By the end of 2020 reached 1000 hours, but the exam was cancelled due to Covid. I have spent \(\approx5.5\) hours/week doing sports (more than I planned). By 2020’s standard my Social Life blossoming! I have set—yes, I was thinking in term of hours here, too—a target of 10 hours/week for Social Life
And most importantly became more conscious of how I spend my time.
Closing remarks
We dream in ideas, concepts. To make them real requires putting them in words, and then actions. Actions can be measured. For example, if you dream about running a marathon you have to hit the track and run, and run a lot. Your colleague tells you about this marathon in 5 months and you decide to finally make your dream come true and sign up. So far, you’ve been running sub-5k runs every once in a while and a marathon seems daunting. How do you plan your next runs so that when the day comes you finish the run?
You can think in terms of mileage
X km/week and increase this number each week until you reach the marathon week
or in terms of your best runs, which is a variation of the above.
Or, you can think in terms of hours! Essentially it is the same, but from different perspective. Tracking hours really puts your goals in direct comparison with other parts of your life and you can easily spot things that prevent you from achieving your goals—if this is the case. Time tracking takes focus from something far and sometimes unreachable to something you have full control over—your time!