I don’t remember many lessons from middle school, but one that sticks in my brain was taught by a substitute teacher, Mrs. Dewitt, in our theology class. Actually, maybe it wasn’t theology, in a Catholic grade school, Heaven could be brought up in Math, History or really, any subject.
Now this was a long time ago, so my memory is slightly hazy, but the core message Mrs. Dewitt was attempting to imprint onto our young minds was the finiteness of life and the infiniteness of the afterlife (or our time in Heaven, if you so choose to believe in that). With great inspiration, Mrs. Dewitt grabbed a piece of chalk and enthusiastically proceeded to draw long sweeping lines back and forth one after the other from the top left of the board to the very bottom right. She then sliced the tiniest portion of the first inch of the first line and said “This is your life on earth,” and pointing to the extremely long lines said “and THIS is your time after death.”
The visual definitely stuck, and here is my best rendition of it 20ish years later.
I distinctly remember thinking, “how?” How could all of my life amount to that tiny bracketed dash on the whiteboard? Even in 6th grade it felt like the days alone dragged on for eternity, this lesson itself felt like a lifetime compressed into 45 minutes. I couldn’t begin to imagine 10 years from that moment, let alone the end of life — a checkered flag at the finish line of a road that twisted, turned, climbed and fell so far out the eye couldn’t hope to see past the first bend.
Kudos to Mrs. Dewitt for taking an honest stab at illustrating infinity to a group of restless Christian tots itching to get out of their tartan skirts and sky-blue short sleeve oxford button ups.
Let’s zoom into that “here and now” portion of the chart.
If you read my letter from last week, you’ll know that the average human lifespan is 4,000 weeks. 4,000 mile markers on this journey, give or take. I talked about how we choose to spend our time, and how unimportant activities tend to eat time that we would rather dedicate to our most important goals in life.
A few years ago, I got really curious about how I was spending my time. I think this was partially because I was afraid of my autonomy when I started living alone. If homework and courses were not guiding how my time was spent, I feared I was bound to squander it. I was on the ultimate “loose leash” and I wanted to make sure my time was being spent on activities that were making me happy, growing me professionally, and not entirely rotting my brain. The thing about living alone is the level of absolute independence you have. You get to be the dictator of your time. I mean, show up for work, of course, but outside of that no one can make you move an inch if you truly don’t want to. It’s the ultimate test of personality and habit. This was emphasized during Covid-19, locked away in the confines of my 680 square foot apartment without human contact for days at a time.
I began to think about what percent of my 24 hours was spent working my “40 hours a week” job. Or reading. Or working out. The “intuitive” guesswork of how I was or was not spending my time did not satiate my curiosity. This is when I decided to create a life timesheet to track how I was spending every single waking second of my time, for three full years (I misspoke in my last letter, stating I had two years of time tracked).
The Experiment: Life as a Timesheet
I started by simply tracking how many hours I was working. On a salaried job, especially one working remote (this was pre-Covid, I worked remote before it was cool to work remote), I was curious about roughly how many hours I was putting into the job. Slowly this tracking expanded into my personal life, until I was “clocking in” for every major category of activity.
The Parameters
Date Range: Jan 1, 2019–December 31, 2022
Conditions: Start tracker at the beginning of each activity, stop tracker when activity is complete.
Tools: I completed all my tracking on the ATracker App.
Notes: Some activities can overlap, i.e., A phone call while driving, both activities would receive an hour of tracked time if occurring simultaneously.
The Categories
Work: Time spent working at my salaried job (I held three different jobs over the course of this experiment).
Socializing: Spending time with friends in any capacity (Happy hour, hiking, playing racquetball, boating… etc.)
Workout: Hitting the gym, going for a run, performing any type of physical fitness.
Personal Development: Meditation, learning via online courses, journaling.
Reading: Reading a book or listening to an audiobook.
Phone Call: Talking on the phone (personal).
TV: Watching TV or Movies.
Gaming: Playing video games.
Flight Travel: Tracked from departure airport to arrival destination.
Driving: Anytime spent behind the wheel.
Side Hustle: From working on RateGigs (a startup I founded several years back) to any other business ideas I was exploring at the time.
The Analysis
Note: If you are reading this in your inbox, you can click on the charts for more detail, or open this letter in your browser to interact with the data visuals.
Why are there more hours here than the total number of hours in a 3 year time period? Read a footnote.1
Over the course of the experiment, I tracked a total of 48% of the time that passed over those three years. The remaining 52% of time is labeled as “Unknown Time” which includes activities such as sleep, appointments, grocery shopping… and the million small day-to-day miscellaneous events that I deemed too small to track all fall into “Unknown” time. The remainder of the charts will focus only on this “tracked” time.
Starting with a bite sized chunk of data, I am looking at the full year of 2021. I excluded the 46.03% of my tracked time that was spent “working” so I could highlight how I chose to spend my spare time. A few notes from this year:
I remember pushing to always have more “reading” hours than “TV” hours. Tracking those activities definitely helped with that.
Socializing, especially as lockdowns started to ease up, was important to me and I had some great friends to hang out with in Austin.
Personal Development is always an activity I’d like to invest more in. My number in this category was a bit disappointing looking back.
I worked out an average of 50.3 minutes a day in 2021 !
Finally, let’s look at all my categories over the course of the full three-year period. I was curious, over the course of my three different jobs during this span, on average, how much was I working a week?
Assuming I took an average of 3 weeks of vacation each year, I was averaging 54 hours a week. Just looking at this pie chart really makes me think about the percent of life that goes towards your job, and how essential it is to find a job that aligns with your passion.
Just for fun, I did a quick comparison on a handful of categories stacking myself up against the average American adult’s year based on data from the American Time Use Survey (ATUS).
We have got to start working less, my friends, and maybe reading some more.
Final thoughts on Spending Our Most Precious Resource
Time feels more subjective than it should, considering it is the universal law that we all must abide by.
We have all been placed in the invisible confines of our Time Zones, and know to show up to the scheduled event on time, let’s say at 7:30pm. 7:30pm ET for me. Our 9 to 5 jobs do not mean 9:30ish to 4:40ish. Doctor appointments are not set against a best estimate of the position of the sun in the sky. Meetings, reservations, flight departures, train arrivals and work shifts are precise. The modern world runs on the second hand, ticking along its invisible dimension across the sky.
But is it natural or healthy to be so tightly connected to the precise seconds passing by in a day? 30 years ago, we might have told our friends to meet outside for a bike ride at “dusk,” rather than at quarter to 7. But today, I set my alarm clock for extremely specific wake-up calls. My iPhone will jingle at 6:23am, 7:32am, 8:05am, or any number of arrangements depending on the day of the week and my morning commitments.
Tracking my activities to the second was an interesting experiment that made me extremely aware of how I was allocating my most precious resource. It allowed me to make conscious adjustments so that I could decrease “unproductive” activities, make an effort to be more social, or know when work was pushing too hard and I needed to spend more time in leisure.
However, this experiment was completely insane on so many levels. What type of serial killer tracks 23 minutes of reading at 10:33pm on New Years Day 2021? Or starts a timesheet for a 7 minute meditation at 7:15am on Tuesday, June 5th 2020, then clocks straight into work tracking at 7:24am ? And monitors his time at this level of granularity for three years? That’s a psychoanalysis for another day.
Did “punching in” for an afternoon of reading take away the joy of just reading for reading’s sake? What benefit was I getting from tracking time spent “Driving” and “Flight Traveling?” I certainly can’t extract much value from that data today. I tracked time for so many years that it became a deeply ingrained habit that I actually had to make a few attempts at breaking. I was micromanaging my life and it was creating more guilt than the optimization was worth.
Reading “Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals” by Oliver Burkeman, which I discussed in detail in Part 1 of this series, helped affirm my decision to stop monitoring my time. He advocates for focusing on only the most important activities in life, being ok with things that “happen” to you outside your meticulous plans, and accepting that you can’t make time for everything.
I’ll leave you with a quote from Burkeman to ponder this week:
The true measure of success is not wealth or fame, but how well you use your limited time on Earth.
The Bel
There are 26,298 hours in the span of 3 years. However, my “total hours” chart shows a total of 35,064 hours. This is because at times I would simultaneously track activities (AKA multi-tasking!). For example, listening to an audiobook while working out would get two hours for both those categories in a single hour.