I time tracked my life for a month

On facing my mortality in 15-minute increments

In August, I time-tracked every waking hour of my life for a month.

This shouldn’t be surprising, coming from the girl who used a spreadsheet to make friends, a PowerPoint presentation to document an ex’s red flags, and a pie chart to make big life decisions.

Very few things in my life can’t be solved by office software.

Lately, I’ve been feeling like I don’t have enough time. I’m always rushing. It seems like I can never fit in everything I want and need to do. All those hours were going somewhere—but where? I had some hunches, but I operate best off cold, hard data.

Against productivity

To be clear, I’m not time-tracking to be more productive. That ship sailed after reading Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. “The average human lifespan is absurdly, terrifyingly, insultingly short,” he writes. But according to Burkeman, that’s good news. We are finite, which means, by definition, we can’t do it all.

“Once you no longer need to convince yourself that you’ll do everything that needs doing, you’re free to focus on doing a few things that count.”

I didn’t want to do more. I wanted to do less of what didn’t matter. My question became: Am I spending my time on the things that matter most to me? To answer that, I had to know where my time was going. Enter: time-tracking.

My methodology

For a month, I used Toggl to track an average of 15 hours daily, focusing the data analysis on my leisure time. Sure, it felt a little strange to step onto a boat with my new friends and press the button to start timing Sunset Boat Cruise - Community & Connection, but I am nothing if not a stickler for clean data. 

The categories I tracked ✅

My entries crystallized into the following categories, excluding my day job:

• Writing: 30%

• Activities of Daily Living: 18% (cooking, eating, getting ready, etc.)

• Community & Connection: 15%

• Movement & Time in Nature: 14%

• Reading & Learning: 8%

• Rest: 4%

• Life Admin: 7%

• Travel: 3% (actual time in transit)

• Piddling: 1% (mostly scrolling of some sort)

I texted my sister pie charts of my time spent each week.

“I need to get my Piddling percentage down,” she wrote back. 

Categories that didn’t make the list ❌

Perhaps more notable are the categories that don’t appear. What I don’t value enough to spend my time on is just as revealing as what I do. A few examples:

• Home: I no longer have a permanent home (the perk of leaseless living) so categories like Home Maintenance & Cleaning have disappeared completely.

• Beauty: I’m actively trying to divest from the beauty industrial complex. My nails are bare. My skincare routine maxes out at two products. One day, I will stop getting highlights and reach full spiritual ascension.

• Shopping: I’ve stopped shopping (h/t to living out of a carry-on) so I reclaimed the countless hours I used to spend scrolling, buying, and returning items. 🫠

• Driving: For the past month, I’ve lived in walkable cities in Portugal, so driving does not appear on my list. I dread the moment it makes a reappearance.

• Dating: Dating made a guest appearance under the Piddling category, as I briefly flirted with downloading dating apps in Europe. According to my (very accurate) records, it took exactly 7 minutes and 37 seconds for me to remember this was a terrible idea and delete them immediately.

What I discovered from time-tracking

Rest was suspiciously missing 💤

After the first week, one thing was clear. There were no entries for Rest. I hadn’t even bothered to create a project for it. 

This data aligned with the very real fact of my body, which regularly felt exhausted to the point of collapse. Working a day job, writing a book, building a business, traveling full-time, and trying to maintain a social life — it’s a lot. 🙃 Without time tracking, I’m not sure I would have been able to pinpoint that gap as quickly. I would have just continued to wonder why I felt so tired all the time.

I added a new project: Rest. This begged the question: What counts as rest? Scrolling on my phone wasn’t Rest (that was Piddling). Reading could sometimes be Learning but it could also be Rest. Gazing at the Sea was Rest. Laying on the Beach - Rest. The multiple massages I’ve gotten since being in Madeira? Definitely Rest.

The value of wasted time ⏲️

Activities of Daily Living landed in second place at 18% which, at first, seemed like an alarming amount of time to spend on keeping myself fed and groomed. Was I spending too much time on these things? Could they be optimized further? But that’s the kind of thinking Four Thousand Weeks warned me against.

The truth is that I like to take my time. I like long meandering walks. I enjoy strolling to the grocery store and squeezing every mango at the market. I love long showers to think, my elaborate evening wind-down routine, and the ritual of making my morning coffee.

“The world is bursting with wonder, and yet it’s the rare productivity guru who seems to have considered the possibility that the ultimate point of all our frenetic doing might be to experience more of that wonder.” – Oliver Burkeman

Sure, I could save time. I could survive on protein bars. I could get groceries delivered. I could hop on a stairclimber at a gym while answering emails, rather than wander the cliffside of Madeira for hours.

But why rush? There’s only one finish line for all of us, and that’s death. I’m in no hurry (though you wouldn’t know it from some of those cliffside hikes).

Distraction as a form of fear 🔪

Having a timer running brought me [Chappell Roan voice] face-to-face with how distraction-prone I am. Despite knowing I'm happiest when deeply engaged, I avoid it at all costs. I lunge for distractions and quick dopamine hits. I multi-task in crazed minutes-long increments. I feel very busy and get almost nothing done.

Burkeman suggests that distractions are where we go to seek relief from the discomfort of confronting limitation. Multi-tasking imitates immortality. It gives you the illusion of being in control.

The most appealing way to resist the truth about your finite time is to initiate a large number of projects at once. You get to feel as though you’re keeping plenty of irons in the fire and making progress on all fronts.

Instead, what usually ends up happening is that you make progress on no fronts—because each time a project starts to feel difficult, or frightening, or boring, you can bounce off to a different one instead. You get to preserve your sense of being in control of things, but at the cost of never finishing anything important.” – Oliver Burkeman

Right as I start to make progress in the middle of a big, hard, meaningful project, I feel an irrepressible urge to take a break from the thing I sat down to focus on. If I never get started, I can never fail and I’ll never see the perfect idea in my mind become an imperfect reality.

“One can waste years this way, systematically postponing precisely the things one cares about the most.” – Oliver Burkeman

Saying no to things I want to do, not just ones I don’t 🪽

I’ve written recently about how I gave up drinking to make room for writing. It’s in the air. This past week, I read Substack posts from

Emma Gannon

and

Daisy Buchanan

quoting the great

Elizabeth Gilbert

asking: “What are you willing to give up, in order to have what you really want?” 

I’m comfortable giving up things, like alcohol, that I know aren’t serving me. It’s much harder to say no to things I want to do, yet I’ve been doing it a lot lately. I’ve developed an almost anti-social reputation among my fellow travelers this summer, as they head off to dinners, boat rides, and music festivals while I faithfully plunk out words on my keyboard.

It can feel militant to hold the line and deny myself things I’m sure I would enjoy. But trade-offs are unavoidable. I’d rather make them consciously than allow a series of mindless yeses to dictate the shape of my life. As Burkeman writes,

“There is no future state where you’ll have time for all of it; you have to choose.”

Or, put more dramatically in this quote from Kafka I have pinned to my workspace:

“My mode of life is devised solely for my writing, and if there are any changes, then only for the sake of perhaps fitting in better with my writing; for time is short, my strength is limited.”

My takeaways

Reflecting on my month of time-tracking, the rankings were clear:

Worst uses of my time 👎

• Piddling: Also known as microdosing dissociation.

• Community & Connection (Large Group): Not every social interaction is satisfying to me, or worth the time. Large group hangs without an opportunity for good connection or deep conversation send me into an existential spiral. I’ve known this about myself for so long. Maybe one day I’ll learn.

• Life Admin: The invisible work that keeps my life running (expense tracking, renewing my license, doing my taxes). I’ll consider outsourcing what I can, cutting down the non-essentials, and making quick decisions where possible.

Best uses of my time 👍

• Writing: A sublime and miserable endeavor that I’ve chosen to devote my life to.

• Community & Connection (Small Group): The anti-social rumors must stop. One of my best experiences this month was dinner out with two new Outsite friends, where we stayed at the restaurant for hours, eating, drinking, and talking.

• Time in Nature: This month in Madeira, it’s taken the form of long sunset hikes to waterfalls, hidden beaches, cliffside trails, and banana groves. These are moments of transcendence to me, as close to heaven as I ever feel.

One thing all of the best activities have in common is that they make time move slower. They make time expand. I could start writing and realize three hours had gone by. Our dinner spread like butter over four hours and I barely noticed.

It reminds me of flow state, the complete creative immersion that distorts time, both speeding up and slowing down. Richard Rohr, a contemporary Franciscan priest, calls this living in deep time. Burkeman writes,

“Living this way, one can imagine that experience would have felt expansive and fluid, suffused with something it might not be an exaggeration to call a kind of magic.”

While I won’t continue time tracking at this level of detail, I loved how this experiment took me off auto-pilot. This exercise helped me clarify where I wanted to spend my time to build, minute-by-minute, a life made up of what matters most to me. As Annie Dillard reminds us, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”

Love,

Lane 💋

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Upcoming Events 🚨

Throw Yourself a Party: Celebrating Non-Traditional Milestones

Virtual | Thursday, September 12th | 9–10am PDT

Focusing on traditional milestones like promotions and weddings is easy. But what about all the other personal achievements that truly shape our lives?

Inspired by Outsite Member Lane Scott Jones' article, this event will explore Lane’s journey of incorporating more celebration and connection into her life, celebrating non-traditional milestones and the power of intentional gatherings. This discussion will have us reflect on your milestones and consider new ways to celebrate them in alignment with your values. We’ll wrap up with a live Q&A session, so bring your questions!

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