On Friday, June 24th, I woke up with a simple thought.
"What if I tracked how I spend my time today."
The productivity maximalist inside me was thrilled. Imagine all the analysis I could do...on myself. So that’s exactly what I did.
Immediately, I opened my Notes app and wrote down “8:23 woke up.”
And then, again, 28 minutes later: “8:51 freshened up, made tea.”
I did this until 9:42 PM, when I started drafting this post. But timestamps didn’t say much, so I went a step further.
I rounded the timestamps to the nearest 10-minute “block”. Then I cast some spreadsheet magic (=(HOUR($A3-$A2)*60 + MINUTE($A3-$A2))/10) to find out how much time I spent per activity.
Lo and behold, "My Day in 10 Min Blocks”...
A good first step, but not good enough to draw conclusions.
I simplified activities into two or less words. I then grouped them into four categories: “Self Improvement”, “Time Kills”, “Deep Work”, and “Other”.
I also created a visual representation of my data:
Realizations
I spent 29% of my time on self-improvement and 34% of my time on uninterrrupted, focus work.
Surprisingly, only 9% was spent on wasteful activities. Tracking my time made me extra-conscious about wasting it.
At times, I caught myself unlocking my phone and immediately went back to working. Even as I write this post, I feel conscious of lifting my fingers off the keyboard to think.
It’s a classic play of the Hawthorne effect.
I also noticed that activities requiring more attention, like writing and learning a language, were also the ones I spent more time on.
I spent 4 blocks on dinner – but only 1 on breakfast – because I was trying a new recipe. And I barely noticed time pass by.
That led to a deeper insight: I needed to cross some threshold of cognitive load to enter a flow state.
My third big realization: Noting down when I finish an activity makes me less likely to take a break.
Every time I logged the end of an activity, my brain went into "what's next?" mode. I "switched contexts" in an instant.
By defining timestamps as bookmarks between two activities, I stopped taking casual '5-min breaks'. Automatically.
Removing these tiny buffers made me feel busier. They also made me far more productive.
Reflecting back, I realize that tracking my day did more than just tell me how I spend my time. It changed my behavior.
The real takeaway from my experiment?
"What gets measured gets managed." - Peter Drucker
Written by Aryan Bhasin