kareina

At the beginning of May I decided to start tracking how much time I'm spending on the things that I do--largely because there is ever so much to be done for my uni work if I want to actually complete this PhD project this year (and I do). While this is only a month and a half of data, and three days during this time I did no uni work at all while helping Harlequin with their costumes, it is still interesting to note the break down. I've opted to bunch everything done into one of six categories:

Sleep 8.42 hours/day
Uni work 4.98 hours/day
Food/e-mail/reading for pleasure/LiveJournal 3.72 hours/day
Useful tasks 3.47 hours/day
Social time 1.92 hours/day
Exercise 1.50 hours/day

It will be interesting to see if/how those numbers change over time. Pity I didn't track it for the entire time I've been enrolled at UTAS--I suspect that the number of hours doing uni work has increased over time, and I know that the food/email/etc. time took a jump up when I discovered livejournal earlier this year. But "social time" wherein I actually see people in person has drastically decreased. One can do computer based interactions at times convenient to oneself, and in small blocks of time between other tasks, repeated over the course of the day--much easier when there is lots to do than to actually go somewhere and meet up with people!

Notes: because of my life-long habit of reading when I eat, I opted to lump both reading while I eat and reading when food isn't involved into one category--on the rare occasion I take a meal with someone else, I'm calling it "social time", rather than "food". Likewise, things like getting ready for bed at night counts as "useful tasks", if I'm on my own, but if I curl up on a friendly lap to brush and re-braid my hair etc. I count it as "social time". I'm also pretty strict with myself, if I take a two minute break from uni work while waiting for the computer to do something, I make a note of it.