Maybe you need a category for time you spend fudging your categories 
I am good at tracking for one week at a time. After that it tends to be “sleeping 46 hours” and “bus commute 14 hours” so I know exactly your pain, probably down to the minute 
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My issue begins when I know I’m being unproductive. I can be aware I need to fill in the spreadsheet, but shame keeps me from doing it, and then later I’m like “fuck when I did I start the things”
I was sick yesterday and watched 3.5 hours of TV instead of doing things I should’ve been doing (okay, I know rest and recovery are important but also…) And I didn’t track it very well because I was feeling shame.
Which the first thing I say when I teach personal finance is “shame isn’t productive, learning is” - I wish I could take that to heart!
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Week one tracking:
Here’s my week graph from Life Cycle. 16h running, but it put 1 hr 24 minutes in the commute category, so that might be 17 hours 24 minutes. It was a big week — I did a 50-mile fun run yesterday 
The blue paw print is my full time job, blue foot prints is running store job, grey cat is pet sitting.
It must have rounded for the weekly graph, but I had 3:15 reading physical books and about 20 minutes not tracked here of audiobook listening (I’m not so into the current library audiobook I have, so it’s been podcasts and a bit of Spotify).
Woody walks were up to 2:45 — I did not walk him yesterday because I spent about eight and a half hours running, so hopefully Sweaty did!!
Total work hours this week: 56:58 — technically the lowest hours week since I started tracking about a month ago, but I did take a whole day “off”. Next week I have Thursday off and not so much pet sitting, so it will probably be similar.
ETA, it tracks sleep as time I am in bed, which is a small but meaningful amount more than I actually sleep.
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I logged 1.6 hours of time spent trapped under one or more cats. I didn’t log when I was sleeping and cats climbed on me, first because they didn’t stay long and second because I was trying to get back to sleep and didn’t want to get a timer going.
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Actual time
Summary
Sleep: 57 hours
Getting ready for work: 5 hours
Commute: 5 hours
Work: 40 hours
Lunch breaks: 3.5 hours (my mom took me out for lunch one day; otherwise I normally take half hour breaks)
Running: 3.8 hours
Other exercise: 0.5 hours
Cooking/baking: 1.75 hours
Laundry: 1.25 hours
Housework: 2 hours
House projects: 0 hours. We hung out with friends all day Saturday instead.
Watching tv/movies: 8.5 hours
Reading: 1.5 hours
Shopping (for groceries and other household things): 4.25 hours. I expected this to be a lot lower but a furniture store was going out of business so we stopped by two locations to see if we wanted anything. We didn’t.
Board games: 9.75 hours. We spent a lot of time Saturday playing board games with friends.
Crafting: 4.75 hours. A lot of this overlapped with TV/movie time.
Scooping kitty litter: 0 hours. My husband cleaned the kitty litter this week 
Browsing on phone: 3.75 hours
Getting ready for bed: 3 hours
I really need to streamline my getting ready for work/getting ready for bed time.
- This week’s predictions
Summary
Sleep: 56 hours
Getting ready for work: 4 hours
Commute: 5 hours
Work: 40 hours
Lunch breaks: 2.5 hours
Running: 5 hours
Other exercise: 0.5 hours
Cooking/baking: 2 hours
Laundry: 1 hour
Housework: 4 hours
House projects: 3 hours
Watching tv/movies: 8 hours
Reading: 2 hours
Shopping (for groceries and other household things): 1.5 hours
Board games: 1 hour
Crafting: 4 hours
Scooping kitty litter: 1 hour
Browsing on phone: 7 hours
Getting ready for bed: 2 hours
Getting things ready for dad’s birthday party: 3 hours
I have misplaced my bullet journal. This is very frustrating for my continued participation.
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This week I worked 5 hours on my side gig and made $161.64, for a total hourly rate of $32.32.
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Oh no!!! I hope that is a temporary happenstance
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Me too!
I imagine it’s frustrating in many ways, you use it a lot! Hope it turns up soon. 
I’ve downloaded Toggl and started tracking. I think it will be great for “what am I doing during work time”, but I need a different option for Duckling’s screen time since I can’t use my phone for that and I want to track what I’m doing while he has screen time as well. I will dig up a notebook for this.
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Week 1.
I spend a lot of time on my phone, doing nothing, with tv on the background.
The Numbers:
Predictions:
Summary
Work: 45-50 hours/week
TV: probably something ridiculous like 70 hours/week since I have tv on when I’m working most of the time
Gaming: 35 hours/week
Social Media: 14 hours/week
Spending time with family: 32 hours/week
Exercise: 5 hours/week
Household (including cooking, shopping, cleaning): 15 hours/week
Me time: 10 hours/week (reading, journaling)
Actual:
Summary
Sleep: 64.5 hours - I forgot to predict SLEEP!
Work: 60 hours
TV/phone time, including having it on in the background when I’m working: 72.5 hours
Family Time:
Drive: 12.5 hours
Loafing around with my husband and pets: 1 hour
Exercise:
Walking: 2 hours
Stretching: 1.5 hours
Household:
Food prep: 3 hours (active time)
Eating: 3 hours
Shopping: 1.5 hours
Me time:
Reading: 4.5 hours
Meditation: 3.5 hours
Accupuncture: 1 hour
Miscellaneous (Hygiene, journaling, listening to podcasts, etc): 4.5 hours
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I forgot to mention on mine that I did basically zero at home exercise last week. I hung from the pull-up bar one morning for like 20-30 seconds. Whoops.
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March Week 1
I added tracking for “Community,” for any volunteer work, activism or giving back.
Breakdown:
- 4.63 hours were spent on myself during the week
- 44 minutes of that 4.63 hours was on the weekend
- 6 hours and 49 minutes spent on Community over the weekend
Toilet Talk
39 total minutes tracked in Log app for the week.
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I think I’m closer to my predictions.
Remarques:
- I averaged 7.79 hrs of sleep per day and I want to make that to 8 per day for this week
- Only 5.25 hours spent exercising and I want to increase it to 7 hrs so at least one hour a day
- I spent 18.75 hrs taking care of myself (eating, hygiene, education, etc.). I didn’t do a lot of driving this week though and I still haven’t started on my certification. But I spent 7 hours ‘resting’, ie lying on the bed and not sleeping. So I either need to sleep during that time or wake up and do something productive.
- I spent 45.25 hrs going to work or working and while that amount seems reasonable, most of it (10hrs) is spent commuting and that’s an average of 2.5 hours spent in public transportation on weekdays. On average 20hrs of the remaining 35 were productive, the rest was spent on breaks, online or in idle meetings.
- Less than 10% of my time is spent with family. I spent about 1.5 hrs per day with the kids, this is just quality time where I’m fully interacting with them and I think that’s great. Now I need to spend more quality time with MG and my extended family (siblings and parents).
- Wow, I do a lot of chores!! I spent 10.75 hours taking care of the kids, 2.75 cooking, 1 hour doing lundry and 1 hour taking care of administrative tasks. I either need to streamline the time to make the kids ready or enjoy it more and classify it as family time. Same for the cooking, it’s too much time for what it get us; I’m not even doing batch cooking or meal prep; just regular meals. The cleaning is taking 1.5 hours and I didn’t clean the bathrooms last week so a cleaning lady is the right answer, right?
- The 13 hours of entertainment are misleading; it’s 6 hours online (mostly the forum, I’m reading @anomalily journal
) and 7 hours watching Good Doctor or other shows on Prime. This is where the time has to come from for more exercise and quality time with MG.
Ok, so I completed 7 days of tracking my unintentional playing around on my phone time (as much as you can track something that’s semi-unconscious).
I predicted 1 hour per day and came in at 1 hour and 45 minutes. My biggest surprise was that I regularly spend 20-40 minutes on my phone in bed in the morning. I am going to try setting two alarms - a “wake up” and a “get out of bed” alarm so that I can have a firm end time to my morning phone time. I don’t want to eliminate it entirely but it’s an easy place for time to stretch when I’m avoiding getting up and doing something I don’t want to do.
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Tracking my “internet surfing” time at work last week clocked in at about what I expected. This morning I’m doing the “No! I don’t wanna be a responsible adult!” backlash unfortunately so my ratio is not improving. I doesn’t help I’m only working two days this week so my brain is already in Friday afternoon mode.
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I tracked using the 15 minute printed-out spreadsheet last week. I’m visual and liked being able to see the whole thing (2.5 pages printed) and still read the entries.
The first thing I noticed: I bemoan not having big blocks of time to work on projects, but when I had a block of time, I had no plan and was flitting from one little thing to the next. So I figured out when I have some time blocks and am scheduling them. As a result I got to work on some things that don’t happen in a typical week.
At times I felt empowered. At others I have felt discouraged and disillusioned.
Rude awakening: I thought it would be relatively easy to total up how I had spent my time just counting up blocks. Never did it occur to me, until I was well into the process last night, that 4 * 7 * 24 is nearly 700 entries to tabulate.
The total was 167, which is correct since we lost an hour to the time change last week.
BUT, my tabulations indicated I took 23 showers last week. Which I am pretty confident did not happen. I think four hours got recorded to showers that should have gone somewhere else. I am not going to wade through the log, now covered in blue and green highlighter marks, to figure out what it should have been.
I made an Excel spreadsheet this morning that will do the calculations for me.
And I was going to type up the results.
Nope. I’ll attach a photo of the final calculations.
Biggest surprise:
I spent 26 hours on things related to yoga last week. Some of them were the aforementioned projects. I didn’t include all of the hours in my estimate, if I had, I would have estimated 17. Between that and my volunteer gig, that’s almost as many hours as my last year in a (supposedly) full time position. It’s got me wanting to quit at Studio 2 where I’m not as happy. I’m not doing so because right now that would be more impulse rather than a well-though-out decision and due to all of their hoops might be harder to get back on if I wanted. But I just talked with someone else, she quit but is staying on the sub list. Though I think they will expect her to sub, and if I quit I don’t think I’ll really want to go back and teach someone else’s class…
Anyway. Enlightening as anticipated. And just recording my time has made me use it more efficiently, no doubt. I wish someone could have recorded my time the previous week, without me knowing it.
OK, here's my predictions:
Also, some of my time on Day 1 was spent trying to figure out what to do about a situation that had been taking a lot of mental and emotional energy. Seeing just how much time? I made a decision, took the bull by the horns and just DEALT with it instead of trying to figure out the perfect way to deal with it. I am happy with the results and glad to have the time I would have otherwise devoted to it, back doing something more useful.
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| Week 1 | Hours |
|---|---|
| sleep | 54.25 |
| hitting snooze | 2 |
| work | 45.5 (incl 11.5hrs meetings) |
| exercise | 2.75 |
| eating | 11.75 |
| in car | 7.25 |
| other | 44.5 |
*work is real work. like if i were in work hours but eating lunch, that’s subtracted out.
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Week 1 report
Predictions
37.5 hours/week at work, maybe 20 hours/week of actual “productive” work while there
3 hours/week working out
15 hours/week commuting and getting around (N.B. I’m considering switching my commute from subway/bus pass to bike sharing to save money, and will be interested to see how this affects travel time)
15 hours/week watching videos/TV
3 hours/week writing
Actual
| Activity | Hours |
|---|---|
| Sleep | 55.5 |
| Productive day job work | 26.5 |
| Commuting/getting around | 20.5 |
| Youtube/TV | 20.5 |
| Eating | 7.5 |
| Self-care | 7.25 |
| Reading articles & news | 6.25 |
| Socializing | 4.75 |
| Misc. life admin | 4.25 |
| Laundry | 2.25 |
| Teaching certificate work | 2 |
| Grocery shopping | 1.75 |
| Writing | 1.75 |
| Gym | 1.5 |
| Cooking | 1.5 |
| Singing lessons | 0.75 |
| Mystery time | 3.5 |
Notes
- I did more productive work than I thought I would! Actually brought up with my supervisor this past week that I was tracking time and thought I needed more work, so she let me have it.
- I go to the gym regularly but apparently don’t spend much time there.
- The one day that I tried biking to work - the very first time!!! - it was not as hellacious as I feared, and I got there around the same time/almost faster than the bus. The only thing that stops me from switching to bike rental is that I have to leave the office in the evening two nights a week, and I’m also still afraid to ride downtown. I might consider switching next month, when it’s even warmer and there’s more light.
- Biggest time-wasters are Youtube/TV and Reading articles/news. They’re okay in moderation, but spending 12% of my time watching dumb videos? No. Not a good life choice.
- I wanted to spend 10 hours writing and only clocked 1.75 lmfao. But! Even with that limited amount of time, I was more productive this past week than I’ve been in a long time. I’m 13,000 words into a novel manuscript, which my writing program says equals 33 pages
- Laundry feels like it takes a weirdly long time and is a hassle. Will try to find a way to cut it down.
- 3.5 hours are unaccounted for, but I’m not going back and counting all the little blocks again because this took me an hour and I’m done.
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