I Tracked Every Minute of My Life for One Month — Here’s What I Learned
Every day I do a lot of things and I feel like I never have any time. So, a good way to check this is simply to count the time spent doing each action, and that’s what I did last month.
My Motivation
Nobody does that. Or you’d have to be pretty sick to spend all your time tracking your time. Especially when you’re doing one thing after another, and you end up doing about thirty different things in a day.
Well, it didn’t scare me, and I saw more benefits than constraints. As I mentioned earlier, you always feel you have no time. The days go by at breakneck speed, even when you’re not doing much.
So my first motivation was to understand where my time goes, and what it’s allocated to. Because I had the impression that I wasn’t allocating it efficiently, that it was “leaking out” and wasting my precious time.
But it was also fun. Yes, who hasn’t wanted to know how much time they spend in the bathroom in a month?
How I’ve Done it
I’m not going to hide from you the fact that it can quickly become cumbersome and annoying to track your time, especially if you perform a lot of actions in a fairly short space of time.
To easily track my time, I’ve used Clockify. I’ve tried other apps such as Toggl, or A Time Logger, but my favorite app was Clockify. Moreover, you have access to a lot of features without paying a subscription. Clockify allowed me to create time entries without friction, and as I was creating a lot of time entries, I decided to stick with it.
Then, after choosing a time tracker, I created different broad categories to classify the stocks. So I had the following categories:
- Distractions: time wasted
- Leisure: things unproductive, but still useful
- Maintenance: things unproductive, but required
- Paid work: productive & paid things
- Passion work: productive but unpaid things
- Personal development: time to improve myself from a personal point of view
- Professional development: time to improve myself from a professional point of view
- Relationships: time to improve (and eventually worsen) my relationships
- Support work: unpaid and not passion work, but that I still want or have to do
- Wellness: time to sleep, to eat, etc…
Then, I created “projects” for each category. Projects just symbolize actions, not real projects. For example, here are some projects:
- Eating
- Playing chess
- Cooking
- Medium writing
…
I didn’t know all my projects in advance, so even though I created some initially, the list was never fixed.
I also created a project and category named “?” which I used when I wasn’t sure where to classify time entries, so I could review them later to assign them to the right category and project.
Next, I had to decide on the minimum time needed to count an action. Because if an action takes 30 seconds, you could very well waste more time creating the time entry than actually performing the action. I chose a level of 1 minute 30.
In the end, everything was in place, but I had to get into the habit of tracking my time. And really, if you’re not used to it, you just don’t think about it. My first few days were pretty rough, and sometimes I completely forgot to track my time for the whole day. I had to set reminders to develop the habit quickly.
Results
Let’s start with some statistics. Over 31 days, I’ve created 1179 time entries, and recorded 730 hours.
So we can already see that 14 hours are missing, or almost an hour a day. I’ve no idea where they go, but by default I’d say they’re maintenance hours.
Well, I’m not going to detail my results because you don’t care and yours would be quite different, but I’ll tell you what this experience has taught me. These are the real results, the lessons we learn from it.
Wasted time is not where you think it is
You might think that the most time-consuming part of your life is watching TV and doing nothing. But in the end, no, most of the time lost is elsewhere.
Over a month, I only had 8 hours allotted to the distraction category. On the other hand, I spent 59 hours eating alone, or 8% of my time. I think that’s crazy, and I never thought I’d spend so much time eating. It’s the 3rd action I spend the most time on. Also, I spent 23 hours driving, and likewise, I never thought I’d spend that much time thinking about it.
So, it’s not really wasted time, but since it represents a big chunk of time, you have to try to optimize it. Because even if you manage to save 10% time per day on these actions, in the end at least it represents a huge chunk (almost 10 hours in my case). For example, you can decide to listen to podcasts while driving, so even if you don’t save time, at least you make this time useful.
Every minute counts
No minute is insignificant, because when you scale this up over longer time horizons, you get huge values.
A simple example: it takes you 10 minutes to get out of bed. What’s 10 minutes in a day? Not much. But now calculate the time lost over a month. 310 minutes, or just over 5 hours. And that’s just getting out of bed. If you add up all the time you waste (and can have an impact on), you can easily save around twenty hours a month.
If you have a project you’d like to work on but feel you don’t have the time, save time on the little things. If you manage to save 20 hours, for example, that’s not insignificant.
Of course, you mustn’t fall into the trap of extreme optimization. Just take your time and don’t stress out because you’ve lost a minute.
The unexpected always happens, that’s life
No matter how hard you try to optimize your time as much as possible, there will always be unforeseen circumstances, things that will waste your hard-earned time over the course of a day.
You don’t want these unforeseen circumstances to lead to frustration. At the beginning of the experiment, these unforeseen events bothered me, and I used to get annoyed because it wasted so much of my time. I changed overnight, telling myself “that’s life, there’s nothing I can do about it”. And indeed, sometimes there’s nothing you can do about it, but you can choose how you react.
I’d like to take this opportunity to extend it more generally: you don’t control everything that happens to you, but you do have total control over how you react to it.
Funny enough, it was tracking my time that made me realize something like that.
Keeping track of your time makes you more productive
Keeping track of your time puts a certain pressure on you. You know that everything is recorded, and that there’s no turning back when you do something.
It’s as if someone is constantly watching you. It sounds strange when you say it like that, and it can be frightening, but it’s just the opposite. It’s a positive boost that helps you understand what’s good for you and what’s not. Simply because having a written record of every action you take is different from just having it in your head.
If you hesitate to do something because you know it will be recorded, then you shouldn’t do it. Whereas if you weren’t tracking your time, you’d have done it without a second thought.
So tracking your time helps you to avoid doing things that are not productive, or even negative (which doesn’t mean you can’t do them because we don’t always do what is better for us, we’re humans).
You’ll enjoy your leisure time more
As you become aware that your time is not infinite, you appreciate better the time dedicated to leisure, relationships, etc….
You also realize that, if you wish, you can have productive days and still have time for leisure. Quite simply because you’re optimizing your time, and therefore freeing up time to do other things.
In fact, you’re finally able to do as much with less time (the productivity/efficiency principle), so you don’t feel guilty when you take time for yourself, because it doesn’t prevent you from accomplishing everything you set out to do.
Final Note
It was a fun experiment, which I encourage you to do too to really realize that you have control over your time. And that every time you say you don’t have time to do something, it’s because you’ve chosen to do something else.
You understand that you shouldn’t say “I don’t have time”, but that you should say “I’ve chosen to allocate my time to something else, so I don’t have time”.
Good luck if you try it! As for me, now that I’ve got into the habit, I continue to track my time, and I set myself targets of hours from one week to the next, either to be done or precisely not to be exceeded, in certain activities.
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