Financial Hogwarts Houses Central (was "March of Time" Tracking Challenge)

Holy shit the badge for this challenge is adorable!

I didn’t track my time basically the last week and a half.

What I learned:

  • I spend much more time watching tv and playing video games than I prefer, but not much more than I assumed.
  • I have very productive and very unproductive work days. But the productivity seems to be equivalent whether at home or at work. It’s more about energy level and clarity of work definition than location.
  • While pretty, tracking with pretty colors is not the most easy, accessible, or sustainable way. I think I’m going to try tracking time in April through an app.
  • I would prefer tracking if I was doing something to be able to relate various activities to moods.
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There’s two badges, folks, I think I got most people got theres so please let me know if you didn’t. I did it without @Smacky this time, so I probably screwed up because she’s much better at this.

The badges are:

  • 1 badge for tracking between 1-3 weeks!
  • a badge for tracking for all 4 weeks!
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I have tracked for all 4 weeks and only got one badge! Um, perhaps I (quite reasonably) didn’t get counted for all 4 weeks because I haven’t reported on the last couple weeks… I was going to do that when I get my Toggl weekly report today or tomorrow.

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Your badge awaits your report back! It’s a good one!

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I was going to do the tracking and badges for you this evening! Let me finish the job

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Thank you! Sorry I jumped to it! I didn’t mean to take the duty from you, I was just creating the icons and then didn’t want to start my day job so I started assigning them :wink:

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Last week for some reason Rescue Time didn’t track Wednesday, so I made a semi-educated guess. Worked approx 11 hours and made $227, for an hourly rate of $20.60.

Total hours for the month were 41.5 for a monthly hourly rate of $24. Weirdly, I guessed I would work 40 hours of work for the month!

I’ll definitely be keeping Rescue Time installed to track my work hours, if nothing else for unemployment tracking, but it will also be nice to keep an eye on my pay rate.

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Had to switch tracking apps, will update Week 4 shortly.

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Surprisingly I actually did track all 4 weeks. Here’s week 4:

I traded car & eating & social time for video games & board games. that makes perfect sense in this weird isolation era.

I know I should make pretty charts, but I’m making so many dang charts for work that I don’t wanna make charts for my personal life!

Week 3 Hours
sleep 54
hitting snooze 1
work 34.75 (includes 16(!) hours of meetings)
exercise 1.75
eating 4.5
cooking/baking 4.5
social 3.5
volunteer 1.5
in car 0.5
chores 1.5
board games 11.75
video games 13.5
TV 5.25
reading 6.5
other / untracked 28
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OK, here’s the past two weeks…

[details=“Toggl week 3”]
Chores - 1 hr 24 min
Wiggler - 9 hr 18 min
Reading - 2 hr 39 min
Friend time - 44 min
Writing - 2 hr 38 min[/details]

[details=“Toggl week 4”]
Chores - 3 hr 1 min
Wiggler - 12hr 21 min
Reading - 4 hr 44 min
Friend time - not tracked
Writing - 2 hr 49 min [/details]

My takeaways here are that I spend less time doing everything than I think, and I’m specifically bad at tracking friend time… especially right now when I’m like, what counts as friend time? I didn’t count the ~hour I spent on the phone with a college friend last night, but I should have.

Also, I get a lot of writing-related work done in those <3 hours that I seem to be spending each week, so go me.

I actually managed to track all of last week! I plan to report out later today. Ride bike while the sun shines (or, at least while it is not precipitating).

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I’ve got to report my last 2 weeks as well! I tallied them up last night so will report today.

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Reporting out as promised.

Week 4
Total Category
54 Sleep
20.5 Internet
11.25 Eat
11.25 Yoga
10.25 Kitchen
9.25 Meeting Stuff
8.25 Social
7.5 Bike
6.5 Read
3.5 Journal
3.25 CCO
2.5 Teeth
2.25 Garden
2 Awake
2 Bird
1.75 Plan
1.75 Cat
1.75 Transition
1.5 Walk
1.25 Drive
1.25 Shower
1 Get Up
0.75 Errand
0.5 Bath
0.5 Early
0.5 Grocery
0.5 Meditate
0.25 Laundry
0.25 Misc
0.25 Not Sure

I decided to simply track time and not be judgemental about it this week. This challenge made me very aware that one parent had very strong opinions about how time should be spent (ahem always productively) and I felt uncomfortable about how much time I spend on the internet. I decided that I do like reading a lot of stuff on the internet. Current events are pretty unique and there’s a lot I’ve wanted to read and learn about. I decided to let the guilt go and simply track without judgement.

I noticed however that the internet is my go-to whenever I feel lonely or bored. I would like to find some better solutions to that. Towards the end of the week I started on one of my longer term Yoga goals. I think giving some structure to my days will also help.

One night I spent the last hour or so of the day reading and journaling in bed. The cat came and snuggled with me, instead of lobbying for me to come upstairs and go to bed. I’d like to end more of my days like that.

I’ve been reading some of the books by Laura Vanderkam. There’s a lot in them and I probably will read them more. She makes the point that it’s important to know what your goals are, and that’s a weakness for me.

I am going to continue to track my time at least for next week. I would like to start trying to schedule a bit more and block out chunks of time to work on specific things, as I’d started to do before the virus struck. From the looks of it, this is going to be what life is like for a while. It’s starting to feel like the new normal and I’m getting into more of a routine with it. At this point I can’t see scheduling much more than a day in advance, but hey, baby steps.

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I meant to do it tonight, but it looks like it will be tomorrow.

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Okay, different breakdown than the last few weeks because I switched apps and that’s too many screenshots so I did the math instead.

Week 4

Knitting (not design work): 4 hours
Knitting (design work): 20 minutes
Drawing: 3 hours 30 minutes
Yoga: 1 hour 13 minutes

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You can track the descent into COVID19 related internet news sites and having to numb myself with television over the course of the month. Final 3 days I imagine will be more of the same.

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I’m a little late with my final update.

My running was way down again: 4:22
Working out at home was up: 2:33
Reading was about what it has been: 2:07
Walking Woody was significantly up: 4:15
Work was down to 41 hours.

I wouldn’t say work is steadying out: one of my coworkers who was out for a couple weeks is back on Monday and that plus a doctor’s weird schedule mean next week my hours will be significantly lower, though there are a couple projects I might be able to work on, depending on what my boss says.

I’m still adjusting to changes that keep happening, so it’s a little hard to look at the data from this month and get a clear picture of how I’d go about restructuring my time, especially as for the second half of the month I gave myself permission to not be productive in specific ways during my time not working. A lot of the “productive” activities I gravitated toward (cooking and meal prep, gardening, small amount of cleaning) aren’t activities I had decided to track.

I am happiest that Woody’s walk times increased throughout the month. He is certainly benefitting from all of this!

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NEW CHALLENGE:

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So to finish off (because I need to feel like I finished something this month!), the last 3 days of March had the same trend as the previous 4 weeks:
Bed: 27.25
Work: 14
TV: 10.75
Internet: 5.25
Eating: 1.5
Hygiene: 0.75
Exercise: 3
Reading: 2.75
Chores: 0.5
Hobbies: 1.25
Unaccounted: 5
This challenge was a bust, so much for reducing my screen time habits!

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Hello all!

I think I got the rest of the badges done. My recordkeeping was messy and imprecise so please tell me if you got missed.

This month had the highest ever dropout rate for a challenge. Possibly because it was March 2020 and so a nightmare shitshow? Who knows!

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