How I Tracked Every Hour of My Life for 4 Years – and What You Can Learn From It

This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Max Patiiuk

For the past 4 years, I have been keeping track of each moment of every day on the calendar. This makes it easy to see where my time goes and whether I am spending it on what aligns with my goals.

While you don’t have to go as far as I did, I hope the tips I present in this article will help you elevate your calendar game. With a bit of automation and structure, you can wield the calendar to get more time for things that matter to you most.

TLDR:

• try hyper-scheduling
• use multiple calendars for different categories of tasks (critical, progress, chore, waste)
• come up with a consistent naming scheme – easier to search and less to type
• set notifications for critical events
• use autocomplete for event names (via Calendar Plus)
• plot how you spend your time (via Calendar Plus)

I am personally using Google Calendar, but these tips apply to all digital calendars.

Hyper-scheduling

Hyper-scheduling is a practice of scheduling every moment of every day. The key reasons to do that are accountability to yourself (you can see where your time was spent) and avoiding procrastination (if you don’t schedule the important things, then the easier, but less important things will fill your time).

If not done right, scheduling every 15 minutes of each day can take a lot of time and add stress – that is the exact opposite of what we want. Some tips to do hyper-scheduling right:

• Use repeated calendar events as much as possible. Examples: sleep, meal time, transit, showering, exercise, chores.
• Add meetings, deadlines, important birthdays, appointments, and other time-sensitive events – put those out of your mind and into the calendar so that you can worry less about forgetting them.
• Put things that are good for you but you don’t want to do on your calendar. If you see “Exercise” on the calendar, it is less friction to do the exercise than to remove the event from the calendar and feel the guilt.
• Put easy-to-forget chores on the calendar – I have a “charge watch” daily reminder to ensure my watch can track my sleep through the night.

Putting sleep and meal time on the calendar is especially important as there are health benefits from doing those at a consistent time every day of the week (including weekends).

The above-mentioned things schedule 50% of your day. If you have a fixed work schedule, add that too, and now 75% of each day is scheduled – that means you have way more structure, less decision fatigue, and less procrastination.

The time you did not schedule (25%) will fill up with random things throughout the day. These are unavoidable, but you reduced the chaos to just a quarter of the day, ensuring the most important things get prioritized.

You can put relaxation and leisure time on the calendar too, but I prefer to keep that part flexible, so that if I have the energy in the evening to work or study, I do that, instead of being compelled to relax. But I will go after the fact and update the calendar to reflect what I spent the time on.

Master using multiple calendars

By default, a calendar app comes with a single calendar. I advise you to quickly expand it to create a calendar per each category of tasks. Having separate calendars brings huge benefits:

• Each calendar event will have a distinct color, making the week more scannable
• You can set default notifications for each calendar, so you don’t have to set them manually
• You can share a single calendar with someone, without revealing all others
• You can temporarily toggle the visibility of specific calendars

Here are the calendars I use:

• Critical: time-sensitive and important tasks (reflection, sleep, appointments, non-work meetings, doing manual backups). They are in bright red color and have 1day, 10min, and 2min reminders to ensure I don’t miss them.
• Progress: my favorite calendar – non-time-sensitive but important work that you should strive to do more of (exercise, study, journal, listen to audiobook, read, write, personal projects).
• Chore: time-sensitive non-important tasks (wake up, meal time, shower, transit, charge wearables, check mail, wind down).
• waste: non-time-sensitive and non-important – guilty pleasures and bad habits (watching YouTube, playing a game, watching a movie) – eliminate or reduce them as much as your willpower allows. These are in gray color to leave disgusting “grey holes” in my calendar.
• Work (or name this calendar after your company name): all work, except for meetings and deadlines goes here. Some people prefer to just put a 9-5 event on each day, but I found it more helpful to spend a few minutes each morning to put 1-2 hour blocks of time for that day for the main things I plan to work on (and adjust as the day progresses). Besides being helpful with keeping me focused on the highest priority tasks, this leaves me in an excellent position to reflect on how I spent my week and makes it easy to report on what I did.
• Work Meet: all work meetings and time-sensitive work (like preparation for a meeting). This is a separate calendar so that each event has a 10min reminder by default and is of slightly more visible color than the regular Work calendar even to stand out more. For virtual meetings that you don’t need to prepare for, you can manually change the reminder to go off 0min before the meeting.
• Mood: a calendar for journaling and daily mood tracking. Read my article on daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly self-reflection that goes into this in more detail.
• Birthdays: synced from Google Contacts. Each event has a reminder 1 day before and on the day of the birthday.
• Me: this is the default fallback calendar. When I am in a hurry, I just create events and they end up on the default calendar. Each event on this calendar has a 1-day email reminder and 1-hour regular reminder. This ensures I don’t miss them, and have time to triage them to a proper calendar. I also use this calendar for non-work non-critical meetings (like meetings with friends or live virtual conferences).

Come up with an event naming scheme

Even once 75% of your day is scheduled using repeated events, we can add some structure to the other 25%. I suggest coming up with a naming scheme for your events – do whatever works for you as it only needs to make sense for you.

My example:

• run <task>. Example: run money (monthly statement tracking and financial reflection), run book (time for deciding what book to read next and finding more great books to add to my library), run music (for curating my Spotify library), run photo (for cleaning up Google Photos albums), run nutrition (monthly reflection on my diet and search for new healthy&tasty ingredients or practical recipes), run digital (digital cleanup and password management). I use the word run as it is shorter than managing.
• read <task> – for when I want to schedule a time to read up on a topic or research something. Example: read react docs, read typescript book, read new york rental market
• prep <task> – for preparation ahead of an important event. Example: prep eye exam, prep dental cleaning, prep insurance documents, prep san francisco trip
• meet <name> – for work meetings with people
• talk <name> – for non-work meetings with people
• shop <name> – for regular shopping runs. For example, shop sprouts (for grocery shopping), shop amazon (for online shopping).

The benefits of this:

• I prioritized for least typing so that I can create events quicker. That is also why I use lowercase for all event names (less Shift key pressing) and use the indefinite form of verbs (so read over reading).
• I prioritized consistent naming so that searching is easier.
• The “kind” of the event is usually the first word so that it is more visually scannable.
• I use Calendar Plus extension to automatically add the events that start with run or read to the Progress calendar, and events that start with prep to the Critical calendar. This is saving a lot of time – my events are automatically put into the correct calendar, get color-coded, and with notifications set up.

Use the dot, Luke

Most calendars allow you to add a description to events. And yet, most calendars don’t show an indication that a description was added to an event. That makes it easy to forget that you added a description to a future event when that event finally comes around.

Descriptions are useful for holding meeting agendas, extra context about an event, or quick research notes – forgetting the description can leave you unprepared for a meeting or without an important document for an appointment.

My solution was to start the event name with a dot (.) if the event name contains the description. That serves as a reminder to me when I visually scan the calendar for the day. Similarly, when the calendar notification comes in, seeing a dot at the start of the name is a reminder that there is a description to read.

Use notifications! (sparingly)

After hyper-scheduling, add notifications to some events. Don’t do this for each event as that is too much noise. Examples of where notifications make sense:

• 10 min before for meetings.
• 30 & 10 min before for leaving the office on time (if you are a workaholic and may stay late otherwise).
• 1hr, 30min, and 10min bedtime reminders – to ensure you begin to wind down on time.

It helps a lot to set a default notification for some calendars so that all events in the “Work Meet” calendar automatically get a 10min reminder.

Schedule the wind-down routine

I used to work till right before bedtime. The head would still be racing about the problem I was trying to solve, making falling asleep harder. Being excited about work is not great for sleep.

Scheduling a wind-down routine for each evening is important. This will highly vary on your preferences, but I picked what works for me:

• 15min: non-work email check, misc browsing
• 30min: English pronunciation lessons (using BoldVoice)
• 30min (while lying in bed): listening to audiobooks (non-fiction or fiction depending on how tired I am) – this is the most helpful for switching my brain away from work.

You might also have a dental routine be part of this, but in my case, I do it right after the last meal.

Bring it to the next level with autocomplete

Even with 75% of your day consisting of repeated events, and even if you use a concise naming scheme for events, there is still some overhead in creating events for the remaining 25% of the day. My solution for this was to create a Calendar Plus Google Chrome extension.

The extension adds autocomplete when writing down calendar events and even puts events into the correct calendar based on the event name.

For example, if you had an event called run taxes, then the next time you start typing run t, it will suggest run taxes and will automatically put it into the same calendar as the previous event.

You can also define manual autocomplete rules. For example, you can say that all events starting with run should go into the Progress calendar, and all events starting with prep should go into the Critical calendar.

Analyze your time usage

Hyper-scheduling your day means you get a lot of data about how you spend each day. You can aggregate this data to look at the time usage for a week, month, or even an entire year. This is immensely helpful when doing monthly or end-of-year reflection to see where your time is going and whether that aligns with your goals.

Unfortunately, Google Calendar, Apple Calendar or Microsoft Outlook does not provide much of anything built-in for for this. As a solution, I added visualization for analyzing your time usage in a Calendar Plus Google Chrome extension.

Some of the helpful tools in the extension:

• Set goals for how much time you wish to spend per day/week/month/year on a given task and track progress.
• Visualize what portion of each time period was spent on events from which calendar.
• See what tasks you commonly do during a given hour of the day.
• You can define virtual “sub-calendars” to further subdivide your calendars.
  • Example categories: category for common work you do, category for each class you attend, category for each person you spend time with.
  • Then, a doughnut chart will further subdivide your time usage into these sub-calendars.

(optional personal story) How I got started with hyper-scheduling

During COVID, I temporarily moved back from the US to Ukraine. My classes and work went all remote but continued being in a US-based time zone (8-hour difference). That meant waking up at 1pm, doing exercise till 2pm, having work meetings at 12am, and sometimes having exams at 3am. Add to that juggling of classes, homework, meal time, and family obligations.

Fun fact: I was having dinner at the same time as my dad was having his breakfast.

Keeping it up in a healthy way for more than a year requires careful planning and discipline.

At that time, I distinctly remember an entire day passing by, without me remembering what I did that day – did I work? how much? did I study? did I have homework due? did I remember to eat and exercise? did I go to sleep on time? I had no idea. Sleeping during the day, working half the night, and doing it all from the same single room made days blend together.

Putting everything on the calendar was critical for keeping track of the obligations, the time zone differences and ensuring I spent my time productively.

An example of a day that would not have been possible without a calendar: an exam, a class, and then 5 work meetings almost back to back:

From the moment I started hyper-scheduling, I never looked back. The pandemic year was one of the most productive years of my life.

Lastly, this article won’t be complete without mentioning the downsides of hyper-scheduling:

• Hyper-scheduling is great for people with predictable schedules (work schedules or class schedules). If your schedule varies a lot or you are often away from a calendar, hyper-scheduling will be tricky. You can still get some benefits by scheduling only the predictable parts of your day (sleep and meal times).
• You can develop guilt about wasting time. This depends on the personality, but if this is an issue, you can totally schedule 30 min of leisure at the end of the day – and classify it as “Progress” rather than “waste” if it is important for you to not burn out.
• Hyper-scheduling and travel vacations don’t mix. Just don’t. Vacation is for temporary getting away from the normal schedule so that you can recharge and re-remember how much you like your work and crave the predictable schedule. I keep track of things until departure from the airport and then am back to tracking only once I arrive back at the home airport. In between those, I only keep track of sleep time and vacation booking times – the rest of the time is put on the calendar as just “vacation” events (on the “Chore” calendar ).
• It takes time to keep track of each day. This is not true if you apply the tips mentioned in this article. I spend a total of just 15min per day on planning the day and updating the calendar, and get hours back in clarity and prioritization benefits.

A tip for getting started with hyper-scheduling: while 15min is the lowest practical resolution for tracking, begin by using a tracking resolution of every 30min of the day or even just 1 hour of each day.

While going full-on hyper-scheduling brings huge benefits, you can improve your calendar game by adopting even a few of these tips. I hope you can give this a try today!

This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Max Patiiuk