Quantified Life
Back in 2009, I decided to track my time minute by minute for two weeks as part of an effort to improve my productivity. As Peter Drucker famously said, “You can't improve what you don't measure.” At one point, I had optimised my life to the point where there wasn't any joy left, and I realised I needed to slow down rather than live as a servant to the system I had created. Nowadays, I take a more relaxed approach to productivity, but the time-tracking habit has stayed with me to this day.
Time tracking has become a habit rather than a scorecard I use to judge myself. It feels good to look at the hard evidence of how I have lived.
Composition over time
Minutes per area of life, stacked by category. Switch between weekly, monthly, quarterly and yearly buckets to zoom in on week-by-week rhythm or compare years at a glance. Areas are ordered by their overall total.
- Sleep
- Business
- Relationship
- Routine
- Learn
- Fun
- Health
- Productivity
- Finance
Year over year
Same calendar month, drawn across years. Pick a category to see how this year compares to the last, with partial years ending where the data does.
- 2022
- 2023
- 2024
- 2025
- 2026
What, who, how, why
The inner pie shows the share of tracked time for each area of life. The outer ring breaks the highlighted area down along one tag axis: what I was doing, who I was with, the state of mind I was in, or the project. Click another area to switch focus, and use the buttons above the chart to change the axis. Tags within an axis are largely exclusive, so the outer ring adds up cleanly to its parent slice.
Inside Business - by activity
- meet2185h 29m · 37%
- make1654h 15m · 28%
- chore848h 8m · 14%
- read815h 2m · 14%
- plan109h 3m · 2%
- consume33h 29m · 1%
- write21h 17m · 0%
- walk4h 36m · 0%
- Other228h 40m · 4%
Sleep
Each column is one calendar day, with sleep periods drawn against a 0:00–24:00 axis. The teal line on the right axis traces total sleep per day in hours.