I took over 2000 notes during 3 months of quarantine to finally figure out where my time was going and to find more time for myself

Hi everyone,

With COVID keeping many of us home, I found myself losing track of time in quarantine. It was down right discouraging to see that I was able to work from home, but I wasn't realizing all the free time I imagined I would enjoy. Many of my hours were getting sucked into social media, youtube, and reading the news. So, about 3 months ago I began journaling what I did during the day in detail. This turned out to be an incredible journey in discovering how I actually used my time.

I ultimately came out of this experience with more time for myself (3 extra hours), fewer time-draining activities, and more mindfulness throughout the day. As someone who can't manage to complete to-do lists or stick to one planning strategy, I wanted to share my learnings for those who have similar challenges.

Here are my 3 key learnings:

Contextualize time spent: Be aware of how you use your time, and what you could have done with that time instead. When we reflect on detailed records of what we did earlier, we are able to consider actions we would have preferred to do instead -- whether it's stay on task or switch to something more important. By recognizing patterns in our use of time, we can anticipate how we'll use time in the future and make better decisions. We can therefore replace good uses of time with better uses of time.

Evaluate your distractions: Many of us indulge in using social media or playing video games. I argue what you do with your time is neither good nor bad, but the timing of the activity is what's important. When a diversion steals your attention away from something that impacts your goals, it's important to reflect on the value of that diversion down the road. By doing so, you can judge if the diversion something that was just poorly timed or something that's valuable and can be scheduled for later. By making this distinction, we can rearrange our days (with breaks!) and eliminate low value distractions. With less distractions and planned breaks, we open up more time for things that are important to us.

Make small adjustments: The cornerstone of good habit building is making habits easy to remember and incremental. When you do step 1 and 2 above, you'll notice many patterns and changes you could make. While the excitement to improve is awesome, I found that it's better in the long run to make small changes over time. The small changes add up and compound as you feed a virtuous cycle of improving the outcome of your day.

If you're interested in how exactly I started, why I started, detailed learnings, and practical tips for trying this yourself, you can read more here.

I would appreciate your thoughts on similar experiments you've tried as I'd like to try them myself and continue to share experiences and experiments with self-improvement and discipline.