I am back
Recently, I left my role as full-time data analyst to focus on my own endeavours. With time at hand to waste, I wanted to experiment with some personal projects, including learning Japanese (again) and writing (this), and other projects on workflows and tech.
Time boxing
One such experiment is time boxing, where I block slots on my calendar for specific tasks. The hypothesis is by tracking the hours I spend on different activities, I can better optimise my life. You cannot optimise what you cannot measure. However, I am not strict with my time boxing approach for now, as (1) I don’t always plan my schedule in advance and (2) I change up my schedule when I need to. My experiment, so my call.
The process and learnings
So I began tracking every single event I did or was going to do on my Google Calendar.
The first thing I learned is how time consuming it is to capture and review all my activities on Google calendar, even when I do this through my phone and laptop. For now, the time spent still feels bearable and necessary, and it allows me some time to review my tasks periodically.
Next, I decided to have some buffer time for certain events for ad hoc activities. For example, a 30-min meditation block could have me meditating and washing up for 15 minutes each. For now, it feels like an overkill to be too specific with some of these activities, but I may change my mind on this as I go along.
To give myself a tractable way to analyse my activities (eg. “How much time do I spend on leisure”), I renamed some of my calendars, created new ones and standardised the naming conventions of my activities for easier classifications later on. Improving the data capture was necessary to make my data processing to analysis stage much more possible.
There are also times where I pick up my phone to do mindless stuff (Who doesn’t nowadays?). Such activities are difficult to capture, and I feel methods like the Pomodoro method will be more suited address this. At least I am more mindful now of my mindless activities.
Did I mention I built something to track my activities!?
With time boxing and the tracking of my activities, I hope to dedicate more time to important activities in my life. That means I wanted a summary of the hours I spent on a daily basis. Naturally, Google Calendar wasn’t built for that. Naturally, I turned this into a data-based tech project, and decided to build a web app using Python to analyse and monitor my activities. Those interested can take a look at my web app at here to see how I am tracking my activities. I will consider writing a separate article on the development process of my web app.
Preliminary results and next steps
While I am still learning from my time boxing experiment it has produced some interesting insights for me so far.
Firstly, I realise I kind of have many small tasks spread across my days, which is supposed to be bad for productivity. So I will try to schedule larger blocks of uninterrupted time. The other things I intend to try is to sleep earlier (I feel less productive and demand more leisure time when I sleep badly), add more Health and Leisure activities (Learning forms my biggest activity block right now), more aggressively test the Pomodoro method, and improve on the web app that I built. In my largest block of Learning, I intend to include more Japanese and personal learning projects.
I think I will end this article for now (already spent >3 hours on this article alone). Hope my new life experiment sharing is interesting! Feel free to reach out to me to find out more about my experiments! If you saw my web app and have some suggestions, feel free to reach out to me too! And I will be posting more life and tech experiments articles soon!
Other experiments I am trying or will try:
- Pomodoro method for overall learning
- Anki method for learning Japanese
- Exercise routine
- Fitness tracker
- Meditation routine
- Sleep routine
- Learning habits
- Tracking income / expenditure (ongoing)
