i tracked every single thing i did in a week, and here's what i learned

Recently our team at the incubator became obsessed with this app called Toggl.

We often say we are productive but how much work were we actually getting done at any given moment in time?

Time to find out.

Turns out, I am actually very, very unproductive in the mornings… About an hour is wasted each day on random daydreaming/webtoons/getting really invested in something random. And I start most days at 11 AM despite waking up at 7:30 AM. That’s 3.5 hours every morning. When in reality the max it should take is 2 hours (which can be broken down into 30 min journaling + 30 min exercise + 30 minutes shower + 30 minutes of breakfast)

This is because I’m a morning overthinker. Like how people say their thoughts and dreams keep them up late at night, for me it’s the opposite. I’m too tired to think at night so all the thoughts leftover from the previous day are processed in my head when I sleep and come rushing out in the morning. So, I think I go through the mornings really slowly. Additionally, I don’t have any pressing obligations since most of my classes are in the evening, so I tend to not have a sense of urgency or intention in my actions. I’m genuinely just getting started.

When I am extremely happy, I actually don’t work that much. I start to daydream or pace or sing or something. And the thing is, I genuinely do like programming and coding after I get through the initial activation energy. But I think my happiness tends to make things a little overwhelming. So, almost every single one of my coding times was followed by Instagram or yapping or daydreaming of some sort. This was a very consistent pattern. I think in the following weeks, I redirect this overwhelm of joy into hobbies like working on the ukulele, which always calms me down. Or blogging progressive updates which also helps me slow down my racing thoughts.

When I’m tired, I have a high tendency to scroll or do something very passive. Which is usually the mornings when I’m groggy and start off daydreaming, or the nights when I’m exhausted from the day.

I didn’t realize I could leverage the different project tags to visually see how I was spending my time until Saturday. I tried to retroactively add the color tags but it was too much work. But assigning different tasks into different groups is effective because toggl tells you how much time you spent doing each project group. While these numbers aren’t entirely accurate, I don’t think they are that far off either.

Amounts of times spent:

Personal projects: 9:39:34 Leetcode: 2:01:03 Career: 6:15:21

Manually added these ones: Insta: 5 hours Talking: 7.5 hours Routine: 21 hours Dance: 2 hours School-related: 8 hours

Just looking at those numbers without context, I can already see most of my time is going into my morning routine, which I mean isn’t a terrible routine, but is definitely a lot slower than is necessary. I think slow mornings on a regular basis leads to slow days. Slow mornings are more appreciated when felt less often.

Total sum of hours tracked: 61 hours There are 144 hours in a week (only counting 6 days). Sleeping time: 48 hours 144-109 = 35 hours which went to random activities.

I think I do a whole lot of nothingness where I consume content – read articles, text friends, or simply just daydream. Commute time of course is involved in this. And I think that’s the reason I always feel productive. It’s because my time on social media isn’t extremely high, it just is.

I only consider 25 hours of that week as productive. On average this means I have 4 hours of productivity per day. I am not trying to be a workaholic or anything, but I do think I should have more productive hours in a day than 4.

I’ve now gotten the toggl desktop app and created color-coded project groups for everything. So hopefully now things for the following weeks should be easier to track. I hope to fix the mistakes of the previous weeks in each following week (or honestly even by day because I think patterns are easy to pick up on).