Have you ever asked yourself where your time goes? Or have you ever wished you could remember what you were doing on a specific day? What about remembering the last time you meet up with a friend or relative? Or the name of the restaurant with the great dessert you visited last year when you were on a business trip?
Back in 2012 I had similar questions and wanted to get to the bottom of how I spend my 10,080 minutes per week. So I decided to start tracking my life in a calendar. Specifically I wanted to:
- outsource memories
- remember past events
- learn more about myself
- become a better planner
- increase my productivity
- change personal behaviour
- have a visualization of my life
Here are some great people that track their life with the help of a calendar.
- Every Step I Take (Nicholas Feltron)
- Productivity Hacking (James Maa)
- Keeping Track of Time (Awais Hussain)
- Tracking My Time Spent (Stephanie Rogers)
- Time blocking and time tracking (Aparna Kher)
- I Tracked Every Minute Of My Life For 7 Days (Nathaniel Drew)
- I Tracked Every Minute Of My Life For 1 Week (Antoniya Ivanova)
- I Tracked Every Minute Of My Life For 3 Months (Matt D'Avella)
- How Six Months of Tracking Everything Increased my Awareness (David Achkar)
- What I Learned After Analyzing Every Minute of My Life for 30 Days (Erin Greenawald)
It's simple - log events in a calendar via a computer or a mobile phone. Utilise a calendar service such as Apple Calendar, Google Calendar or NextCloud that acts as central hub and automatically sync events between different devices such as your mobile phone or home computer. Analyse the data!
I have an Apple iMac and use the default macOS Calendar app.
I have different calendars to better categorise events:
| CAL | Calendar | Used for |
|---|---|---|
| EDU | Education | Learning related activity, such as training, courses, etc |
| EMP | Employment | Work events, including work hours, meetings, interviews, etc |
| ENT | Entertainment | Time spent on a computer, television, with a book, etc |
| ERR | Errands | Shopping for groceries, clothing, electronics, etc |
| FOO | Food | Eating breakfast, lunch, dinner, or snacks |
| HEA | Health | Doctor visits for medical, dental, etc |
| HOU | Housework | Cooking, cleaning, doing the laundry, etc |
| HYG | Hygiene | Personal care such as showers, bathroom visits, haircuts, etc |
| PRO | Project | Personal interest projects |
| RES | Rest | Sleep hours |
| SOC | Social | Social activities, such as meeting friends, etc |
| SPO | Sport | Physical activity, including running, cycling, sailing, etc |
| TRA | Transportation | Time spent on the move via car, subway, walking, etc |
Each event has a different event title and event notes with more details. The smallest event duration logged is 5 minutes. Here are some event examples:
I log events directly on my iMac via a simple button-press from my Streamdeck via predefined events that were created in macOS Shortcuts (Examples).
When being mobile I log events on my iPhone via one-touch iOS shortcuts (Examples & Downloads).
At home, I also use a setup that includes wireless switches which allow me to log events via a simple button press. Zigbee switches are cheap buttons that run on a coin cell battery and when pressed send a signal to a server, which in return creates a calendar event. I've written up a full setup tutorial which can be found here.
I've documented various alternative software & hardware options across different systems on how to log events to a calendar.
Events are extracted from my macOS calendar via Export Calendars Pro and saved in a spreadsheet.
The spreadsheet is added as a data source in Tableau which is used for analysis.
