A few years ago I was frustrated by the sense that hours kept disappearing from my life and I had no idea where they were going. So I started tracking how I was spending each hour, every day for maybe 2 years, in a google sheet. This unfortunately didn’t solve the problem, but at least I knew.
Here’s a cute trick in the vein of structured procrastination, that we might call “structured Hamming procrastination”: find out the two most important problems in your life, then work on the second most important one to procrastinate working on the first most important one. Still a big improvement over what most people do.
Have complicated thoughts about this. The short and unsatisfying summary is something about breaking through Schelling fences.
Huh, I did exactly the same with tracking my time in my Google sheet. Also two years. It also didn’t fix the problem, but did seem to help a good bit and made me aware of how I spend my time.
I also did this, and it gave me a more acute sense of the hours passing. I even made a spreadsheet after the end of each week to see what my time allocation looked like in broad strokes.
I stopped because it got laborious and I’d already gained a heightened awareness of my time usage.
A few years ago I was frustrated by the sense that hours kept disappearing from my life and I had no idea where they were going. So I started tracking how I was spending each hour, every day for maybe 2 years, in a google sheet. This unfortunately didn’t solve the problem, but at least I knew.
Here’s a cute trick in the vein of structured procrastination, that we might call “structured Hamming procrastination”: find out the two most important problems in your life, then work on the second most important one to procrastinate working on the first most important one. Still a big improvement over what most people do.
Have complicated thoughts about this. The short and unsatisfying summary is something about breaking through Schelling fences.
Huh, I did exactly the same with tracking my time in my Google sheet. Also two years. It also didn’t fix the problem, but did seem to help a good bit and made me aware of how I spend my time.
I also did this, and it gave me a more acute sense of the hours passing. I even made a spreadsheet after the end of each week to see what my time allocation looked like in broad strokes.
I stopped because it got laborious and I’d already gained a heightened awareness of my time usage.
There are apps like Toggl that can be used for basically this with much greater automation/less manual labor.