Last year, I spent a week time-logging, which is the practice of categorizing what you’re doing for every hour of your day. Or, in my case, every 15 minutes of my day. It’s incredibly tedious, as you might expect, but I also find it rather fun. So, after time-logging for the third week of March in 2022, I set a calendar reminder to do it again during the third week of March in 2023! Last week, I logged my time and here’s how it all broke down:
The fun part of this exercise is that now I can compare how I spent my time in 2022 and 2023. There were some very interesting patterns that emerged:
What stayed the same
- Sleep – Last year, I was astonished to find out that I spent more than a third of my week unconscious. Well, friends, this must be how I like to spend my time because I did the same thing in 2023. And actually, my percentage of time sleeping/taking naps increased by 1%! What can I say? I’m a girl that loves her bed.
- Talking on the phone with my mom – It’s no secret that my mom and I Facetime with each other more than the average person. Last year, I logged 4 hours of time on the phone with my mom and the same held true this year!
- Work – I’m always surprised by my work percentage. It was not a huge piece of the pie in either year. I’m trying to embrace this rather than worry that I’m doing something wrong. I get my work done and that’s all that matters, right? Becoming a people manager has definitely shifted the way I work and has freed up a lot of my time.
- Blogging – Last year, I broke up the blogging category differently and only calculated the time spent working on blog posts. This year, I included all things that are part of blogging: responding to comments, working on my blog categorization project, reading blogs, and commenting on blogs. I separated “computer time” for things like reading e-mail newsletters, reading Reddit forums, online shopping, etc. It ended up working out to the same percentage in all, but I’m interested to see how this blogging category changes or stays the same next year.
Other categories that stayed about the same from 2022 to 2023: morning/nighttime routines, workouts/walks, cleaning, driving/errands, and watching ASMR on YouTube (which is what I do to fall asleep).
Things that changed
- Phone time – You guys, I spent so much time on my phone this week. I have always had a pretty high screen time average, but this week, as I had to painstakingly enter in “phone time” in these 15-minute increments, I started to really notice how much time I spend on my phone. It ended up being 10.5 hours in total. Eeks!
- Podcasting – A new category! I spent almost 4 hours working on my podcast this week, between scheduling social media posts with Hootsuite, working on podcast outlines, and recording episodes.
- TV – I spent more time in front of my TV this week by 2 hours. Most nights, I watch about an hour of TV and then a few more hours on the weekend, but it’s still probably less than other people.
- Reading – This was a sad realization for me! I spent less time reading this week, but it was a week where I DNF-ed three books in a row, so that was probably bound to happen. I make less time for reading when I’m reading books that aren’t interesting to me!
- Social – I had a pretty decent week of being social (a date night, book club, time with mom, etc.), but it still wound up being a bit less than this time last year. Although, if I counted the hours I spent with Bri recording podcast episodes (which was categorized under “podcast” and not “social”), it would be about the same.
What I learned
- I need built-in buffer time between tasks – This is something I mentioned last week and thankfully, yesterday, I had a therapy appointment where I discussed how I tend to spend 10-15 minutes between tasks playing games on my phone. One thing my therapist said that stuck out to me was that I have simply trained my brain to need this buffer time, and I can train it to not need it. I have identified this issue and now I can start thinking about habits I can enforce so that I don’t immediately pick up my phone to play a game when I’m transitioning between tasks. Maybe instead I can pick up 10 things around my apartment to put away or read one chapter of a book. I’ve also moved all of my phone games to the second screen of my phone inside a folder, so hopefully that will help, too.
- I need routine – One of the biggest things I’ve struggled with since I started working from home is finding a routine that works for me. Is it time blocking? Is it the pomodoro method? Is it putting on real clothes and doing my hair and makeup, even on days when nobody is going to see me? Is it going to a coffee shop? I’m still trying to figure out the right kind of routine, but I do know that it’s something I need because I feel really untethered without one.
- I need to put my phone away at night – I have this bad habit of settling into bed with my book and my phone, reading one chapter of my book, and then immediately picking up my phone and scrolling through TikTok or Instagram or falling into a research rabbit hole of my latest obsession (one night, I spent 30 minutes reading up on skincare routines). The problem is that I use my phone right before bed to watch ASMR videos. They relax me and help me fall asleep. So I can’t just put my phone in another room. What I would like to do is only use my phone for ASMR once I’m in bed – maybe even put one of those app blockers on my phone that would block the apps I’m most notorious for using at night. That feels extreme, but maybe I need an extreme option until I’m out of the habit of using my phone so much at night.
Doing this time-logging exercise once a year has really helped me better understand where my time is going and what types of activities are sucking the life out of me, like how often I pick up my phone and get sucked into it. I’m excited to repeat this exercise in 2024!