Tom Says: Code something crazy every day you feel like it!
I've got these two friends you should know: jperla and Mason. They're into self-evaluation, asking questions like, "am I making the most of my time?" One decided he wasn't and is taking the year off to travel and rack up some real-world experience. The other almost never came back from his real-world experiences in Silicon Valley last summer, has sworn off RSS, and wants to do the same with e-mail. Neither has given much encouragement for the GPA-centered lifestyle I'd been living (not that I had much to show for it).
After a while being around those two, I got the idea of tracking my time to see how it was being spent. I knew it would be an absolute pain-in-the-butt, so I made a plan that tried to balance usefulness with pleasantness.
I did the tracking with TikTok, a GPL'd timer application for Palm which I couldn't recommend more. It's simplicity at its best. I bound it to a hard-button and could start or stop a timer in seconds.
I decided to track only "productive" time, as opposed to the time I spend doing unproductive things like eating, sleeping, and watching Bleach. I split the productive time into "enjoyable" time and "crap." It has become my opinion that I should strive to live a life consisting of nothing but enjoyable productive activities and non-productive ones. I should strive to cut out the crap.
I further subdivided the enjoyable and crap time, even though the only two I was really interested in were the categorical ones.
The only crap timers I ran in the end were for various courses I'm in. It's not that I don't like my courses and that I think they're crap. I dislike most of Moral Philosophy and Reasoning About Computation, but the others I really enjoy. The time I recorded for those is the time which I spent solely to "make the grade," like attending boring lectures, writing boring assignments, doing boring labs, etc. In short, the overhead as compared to getting taught one-on-one by the professor.
After a week, I had the following timings. I worded these as goals, as I do with my top-level items in Life Balance. Being a programmer is more than just programming; speaking Japanese is more than just speaking Japanese; and so on. On the other hand, I didn't feel like I was working toward any goal during my crap time, so its divisions are less nuanced.
| Enjoyable | |
|---|---|
| Programmer | 13 hours |
| Music Artist | 2 hours |
| Sketch Artist | 2 hours |
| Japanese Speaker | 1 hour |
| Martial Artist | 2 hours |
| Total Enjoyable: 20 hours | |
| Crap | |
| Course: Reasoning About Computation | 11 hours |
| Course: Operating Systems | 2 hours |
| Course: Moral Philosophy | 2 hours |
| Course: Human-Computer Interfaces | 2 hours |
| Total Crap: 28 hours* | |
* Note: I didn't decide to subdivide crap hours until late in the game, so the data is incomplete.
Timing the crap in my life, in the end, turned out to have motivational impact only. I cannot remove any of those sources of crap until at least next semester (but probably not even until I graduate). However, I can keep them in mind when I make similar commitments in the future. Knowing that I spend so much time on crap has also made me conscious of the fact that I could be spending so much more time on the things I enjoy.
By far, the most enjoyable part of the exercise came before I ever hit "start" on my timer: it was brainstorming what to time. The ability to see beyond the "productive" label to the worth I actually place on the things I do has given me immense clarity for decision-making. I have a list of the things I really care about improving right in front of me when I have a few seconds free and am wondering what to do next.
One of the things I noticed was that, by the end of the week, I had entered the timers' feedback loop: seeing the recorded time was affecting the way I allocated it. This is bad in terms of the experiment, but good in terms of my overall happiness in life. I wasn't quite sure of which was more important.
This little study is just begging for a follow-up, so look forward to one in the coming months.
Posted Oct 28, 2007, in the late, late night.