What the hell? What is time tracking? Why do you have this data?

One of the productivity things I do is time tracking. Every time I started to do something "productive", I would click a button on my phone and it would start a timer tracking what I was doing and for how long. By doing this since the first day of classes, I have ended up with a large amount of data of what I have spent my time doing this semester.

This begs the question, what is "productive" mean? The answer is, it's pretty arbitrary. The basic idea is I track activities that I want to encourage the behavior of. It's why I tracked categories like Social as I was worried I would not make enough friends and do activities with them. It also leads to weird definitions of these categories. I would never track Social if I was online talking to friends from home, just with people in person. Also, I would track the time I spent doing laundry, but not moping the floor. Why? idfk, I just didn't. I didn't want to spend a lot of my time thinking about how to track my time so I just did whatever feels right. The data is not perfect, but thats acceptable.

Overview

Total Hours Tracked: 960:23:37

Wow, that seems like a lot. It is over a total semester so I guess that makes sense. However, this only averages out to just over 8.5 hours per day on average. All of the sudden, that is a lot less, especially when you consider the fact that I was also tracking transit and social time in this. I think this is a reasonable amount of productive time per day for my first semester. My goal would for this to be about 1-2 hours higher next semester, but I am reasonably happy with this.

Average Time Spent Per Day of the Week

This surprised me. I would have thought that I spent a whole lot more time per week on fridays due to Hack Night (we will discuss that soon enough), but I guess it was outweighed by me finishing most classwork by friday and spending some downtime. The Saturday and Sunday amount is significantly higher than I would have expected as well.

Class

I spent 373 hours on class work. This was a schedule with 15 credit hours with 4 classes + 2 one credit classes at Purdue University. I took CS180 (Introduction to programming in Java), MA265 (Linear Algebra), POL229 (Political Philosophy), and STAT350 (A standard Statistics class, a bit harder than AP Stats). Additionally, the 1 credit classes I took were CS193 and TDM101. STAT350 was one I took asynchronously online so all work for it was in the Out of Class category.

I spent nearly double the amount of time Out of Class as compared to In Class. This number will defiantly increase as I start to take harder classes. I wish I differentiated between studying and assignments so I will be sure to do this for next semester. I will say, I am a bit sad I spent over 12 hours in exams

This is mostly what I expected. A lot of my time spent in CS180 was due to the group project which can be seen when we look at the plot of time spent per week.

This data isn't totally accurate. I messed up in tracking so my numbers for the last week are a bit off. However, you can see the spike in the CS180 class time which correlates to when the group project started. Before that it was in the ballpark of all of my other classes.

Clubs

I spent about 110 hours on clubs this semester. The clubs I focused on was AMP and an Design, Build, Fly club which I titled Airplane in my tracking system.

This is about what I expected, although the numbers are slightly less than I would have thought. I felt like I was spending a lot of time on clubs but that also comes from spending a lot of time thinking about them. There is no way to track that without loosing the point of everything so I did not.

It is interesting to see how clubs were the first thing to go once I got busy. In the last few weeks, I didn't even participate in clubs at all. Next semester I would like to maintain at least some involvement when the times got rough.

I very often swapped between the two clubs that I worked on the most between weeks. I find it helps me to stay engaged by swapping between tasks often.

Personal

I spent about 460 hours on Personal time. This is a category of items that is for my personal benefit.

I am surprised by the amount of Social time. Going into Purdue, this was something I was very worried about so I am very happy to see that it is not an issue. I also spent a lot of time on Projects which I wish I broke out into separate categories. I am guessing that a majority of this time is for WiiMix but I can't definitively tell.

The weekly breakdown is interesting. One of the things to note is how my Transit time was much higher for the first few weeks until i got a bike. Additionally, my Exercise time decreased as the semester went on. This year was actually incredibly successful for me in terms of physical health so I will need to watch this trend going into next semester to ensure it does not continue.

Hack Night

Every Friday Night, Purdue Hackers hosts a social event at the makerspace on campus. Here a bunch of nerds work on cool projects. I spent just under 65 hours there over the whole semester

Overall, Hack Night was a reasonably productive place for me, especially once I got a project to work on. I did treat it more as a nerd social hour initially, but I loved that too. Thanks, Purdue Hackers.

Conclusion

Overall, I am pretty happy with the year as a whole. I think I should probably focus on increasing my hours overall next semester. I defiantly could get more out of my time and the insights into my time that I got was very useful.

Just the act of tracking was also helpful. Clicking a button to say "this is what I am going to work on now" is a great way to ensure that I remain on task. It hijacks that part of my brain that requires the data to be correct making me actually work. I highly recommend time tracking to anyone who found this at all interesting.