An experiment in reducing pointless tasks through tracking
A perfectionist's worries about tracking after two weeks
As mentioned in the first newsletter of the year, I’ve started to track my time to understand where it’s fleeing.
While I’ve been using Clockify for work for over two years now, I’ve decided to turn to Toggl for this new endeavor. Why? Simply because it’s got a nice interface and seems to allow creating nice reports with more ease.
I’m still unsure of how to track everything properly though. Should I use tags more? Or projects? Or just use a set of Descriptions and never stray away from them? Should I track every little moment or just the ones I care to look at?
My overly perfectionist mind keeps on making me doubt whether the way I’m tracking is correct or not. Even if it doesn’t matter that much.
And yet, here we are, two weeks in, and I’ve already learned a few things about how I track.
Tracking & Pressure
One of the main reasons for me to start tracking my time is to know how much of it goes into YouTube videos. While not all I watch on YouTube is pointless, a vast majority of it is. My goal here is to find out at what times I fall into a pattern of binge-watching YouTube.
One interesting result of tracking my time is observing how I’m much more likely to stop quickly if I start recording what I consider as a task wasting my time.
For example, I didn’t record anything this past Saturday and ended up watching almost 4 hours of videos1, which was 2 hours more than the day I watched it most in these two weeks. It made me so ashamed, I didn’t even record it afterward which means the actual comparison of weeks 1 and 2 isn’t even proper.
Keeping track of this time makes me more aware of the time I spend on it.
And yet, while my first week was filled with tasks I do every week, this second one included a lot of one-off tasks, mostly related to preparing for my departure from Korea and travel to Taiwan. Whenever I tried to record these, I felt pressured to use the right description that I could potentially use again in the future. I felt a need to bundle tasks.
Same thing happened when I realized I had YouTube, Audiobook, and Reading in the same project “Rest.” Sure, all are a way to rest but I definitely don’t perceive each at the same level. I ended up creating a project called Reading to separate those into two categories I could compare.
But then, I spent over 10 hours in two days reading a Webtoon, Solo Leveling, in English. This does count as reading but, again, I don’t put it at the same level as reading a novel.
Then, there’s the big question of multitasking.
I’m conflicted regarding how to handle movements from one place to another. I think knowing what I do when I’m moving could be useful but recording two tasks at the same time is not so great. I can see them when I’m looking at a day’s tasks, but this doesn’t show up in reports.
Come to think of it, this could be where adding an extra tag could come in handy. I guess I’ll experiment with this.
All these reflections keep making me feel pressured even though I’m doing this for no one else but myself.
One conclusion I’ve come to is that there’s no need to track absolutely everything. Sure, this means there’ll be holes in my tracker, but it’s not like someone’s looking at it ready to scream at me if I’m not busy 24/7.
All or nothing
On the contrary, I’ve noticed that the things I do want to do, notably reading, get pushed to the front as long as I’m not done with what I’m on.
I was at the beginning of the third tome of The Demonwar from Raymond E. Feist when the new year came around. I loved that book so I ended up spending a lot of time reading it the first week.
The moment I finished was also followed by a day with more “Rest” tasks, notably two movies and close to 2 hours of YouTube. Then I started the Webtoon and down went these tasks… until I finished the webtoon. I finished it last Friday and Saturday went… well, I already told you.
What this is showing is my incapacity to control myself.
I go all in until I’m done with a task and then forget it completely. Hell, I already forgot the names of many characters from that webtoon.
This is something I reckon I’ll be able to tackle if I succeed in staying consistent in recording my tasks.
“If”
That’s what scares me.
Got some advice for someone trying to figure out how to properly track tasks without filling in every detail? Please let me know in the comments!
Cheers for reading!
Mathias
PS: for those wondering, I didn’t mention much of language learning this week because I haven’t been doing much of it these days. I’m finding windows of time to do some here and there but nothing much tbh.
According to my phone so this doesn’t even include the time watched from my computer
Interesting! I've never tracked a whole day of my tasks. I use Toggl just to track language learning. I do a bit of time tracking on my task manager app Tick Tick but the only task I end up tracking is when I write my newsletters. I wonder if maybe Tick Tick may be better for you if you see the things you do in your day as tasks? It gives detailed reports and charts, there's also a calendar to schedule in tasks. You can track habits as well and time track them as you're doing them if you want. Some of these features may be paid but I find the cost inexpensive since it offers so many features.
I'm sorry if I did time track my day I'd fine a lot of YouTube watching I may want to reduce.