Simply put - at the beginning of 2017, I decided to start analyzing my life. A mid-life crisis already? Thankfully, that wasn't the case. On January 1, I began logging how I spent my free time through an iOS app called NowThen, mainly to help with productivity and stuff and reduce my entertainment time while increasing the time I spent on work, learning stuff, and other “useful” activities.
Below, you'll find an assortment of tabular data. At the beginning of winter break, I decided that the homework we’d been assigned wasn't enough and resolved to learn how to use Excel and crunch all of this data about myself that I'd gathered (I'd used Excel for school projects, etc. in the past, but never as extensively as I did for this little project, and I'm glad to have picked up quite a few interesting concepts).
Throughout 2017, I logged a total of 2882.63 hours. 1106 hours, or 38.35% of that, went to one of my categories, called Work. 1032 hours, or 35.81%, went to Entertainment. 249 hours went to Sport, 248 hours or 8.6% to Home (aka housework, spending time with family, teaching my grandparents how to use their phones [which was a fun thing I did last summer], etc), 234 hours or 8.1% to Learn Stuff (such as going on TIL on Reddit [hey sometimes Reddit is useful], learning German [I mainly used the apps Duolingo, Memrise, and Linguist {if you have any other ones, please recommend them to me, because learning German is honestly really fun for me and I'd love to get better at it}]), and 15 hours or 0.52% to Music Practice.
A few arbitrary things I decided on were: I wouldn't log my time dedicated to sleeping, school (I did log time spent doing sports like track, but not time at clubs like debate and robotics, so that definitely made results inaccurate — although, my reasoning was that for track, we practiced on a set schedule, while for robotics and stuff, it was way more chill, and lots of the time spent in the club was spent socializing, having dinner, etc.), or time spent volunteering.
• From January 1 to December 30, I logged 14,126 total entries (that’s about 38.6 per day and 1.6 per hour — of course, this doesn’t really mean that much, because entries could last from 5 seconds to 4.85194 hours [that was the longest time I'd logged for continuous entertainment, aka a FaceTime with a few of my friends from ~12am-5am on December 28])
• The week I did the most entertainment was “Week 52” (this week) — pretty much a bunch of FaceTiming my friends at night (I probably got less average sleep during winter break than I do during the school year); the week I did the least entertainment was “Week 12”, starting March 20. Why? Well, I checked back in my yearly journal (yeah I keep one on Evernote, it was actually really fun to go back and read through my year: I could actually see the confidence within myself grow throughout the year, particularly about approaching certain social groups and stuff) and it looks like this was a pretty busy week. I was a shadow leader (showing 8th graders around my high school) so I came home later most days, and also had a Model UN conference to write my position paper for, so I didn’t have much time to waste at home. I also wasn't home for most of the weekend, and as per my arbitrary rules, I didn’t log time spent outside of home.
• The week I did the most work started January 22. I won't bore you with details: midterms. Least work was the week starting July 9. This was a fun week. The midnight before, I had gotten insane stomach cramps. 5am on July 9, I found myself at the hospital. Apparently I had this thing called Meckel’s Diverticulum, some weird intestinal thing that they had to remove with surgery. So I was in the hospital until nighttime July 13.
• You don't think I didn’t time how long this project took me did you? Took about 8 hours overall, but lots of that time was spent learning how to do the different functions and stuff required on excel.