How I spent my time in 2021

Yesterday I read fellow Inkhavener Nicky’s post about what she did on one day of her childhood. I also tracked how I spent my time as a child, but instead of for one day, tracked what I was doing every ~45 minutes (sampled at random seconds, where each second had a 1 in 2700 chance of being sampled) from July 2020 to May 2023 (ages 15-18), with 33,235 data points in total. Excited to outdo Nicky, I’m going to go bigger and give you a much more detailed breakdown of how I spent my time in 2021 specifically, when I was 16 years old for most of the year. I had Claude do most of the annoying data analysis work since there was so much data here.

In the underlying data, I tracked my time by assigning each ping a set of free-form tags. Here, I’ve assigned each ping to a general category by using a bag of heuristics about what the most “relevant” thing is. This does end up abstracting away some interesting details about the data: e.g. I often watched YouTube while eating food, and in the graphs in this post it just gets treated as “Eating” time.

Graphs

First, here are some cool graphs Claude made (a sunburst chart and a stacked bar chart):

School

I only spent 1-2 hours per day doing high school on average. This was during the Covid lockdowns, so I did most of my learning remotely. My school work wasn’t difficult, so I was able to get most of my assignments done pretty quickly. There were still some synchronous activities I did (e.g. lessons over video calls), but I was mostly able to not pay a lot of attention during them and focus on other stuff.

I’m pretty glad I was able to spend as little time as I did on high school. I don’t like formal education systems, which tend to dictate too much of how you should learn (and what you should be learning about); I didn’t get much actual value out of the formal classes in my high school education and I think it’s good that I was able to waste relatively little time on them.

Unfortunately I had to go back to school in person for the first semester of the new school year that started in September 2021. Luckily I was able to avoid going to school again in 2022 (in my final semester) by front-loading 4 courses in the first semester and only taking two distance learning courses in the second semester.

Side note

Technically I had to be enrolled in a third course in my second semester to maintain “full-time student status”, so at first I was enrolled in some random geology class (because it was the first one in the list). I was told that Bad Things would happen if I was habitually absent (absent for 14 consecutive days) from a class though, so I had to show up once every 2 weeks. Later I got moved to a weird 0-credit course where I had to send an email about what I was doing every 2 weeks (I think this was supposed to be like virtual study hall?). Later still, I was dropped from the fake 0-credit course and told I could stop sending an email every 2 weeks.

I’m not entirely sure why I wasn’t allowed to just be a part-time student from the start. I know that schools get funding based on full-time-equivalent students (so they would get half the funding if I was a part-time student), so perhaps this whole thing was some kind of scheme to get twice the government funding for me?

Sleep

The “sleep” category counts all the time I was in bed (not just time actively sleeping), because I didn’t have a way to track how exactly I slept. (I now have a smart watch that does track when I go to sleep and my sleep phases, which is nice for ensuring I get enough time asleep.) You can see it took a big hit when I had to go back to school :(

Did I spend my time well?

I don’t think I spent my time even close to optimally; I wish I had spent more time doing more self-directed learning and software development. I spent too much time watching YouTube and scrolling Hacker News, which was somewhat useful but pretty far from the best way I could have been using my time. I did some interesting projects related to machine learning, and I wish I had gone further with them. I spent too much time doing things that are fun and interesting in the short-term but didn’t provide me with much long-term value; I wish I spent more time doing things like creating software and trying to deeply understand the world better.

During 2021, and even to a lesser extent today, I ended up not really planning out what I should do and often ended up aimlessly doing a bunch of different random stuff. I think trying different things is good to do, especially when you’re young! But I also wish I was more thoughtful with how I spent my time and did more long-term planning to decide what would have been important to focus on. I feel like my life would be better if I spent more time planning out my long-term goals and spending more time re-evaluating how I can be on track to achieve them.