My new philosophy for measuring time
I now use a different system for measuring time.
the core philosophy is simple - instead of measuring in minutes and hours I measure percentages of the day.
I figured the simplest way to map the day is to first remove the hours we sleep in and only count what I call effective time.
if we reserve 7 hours and 20 minutes to sleep, this leaves us exactly 16 hours and 40 minutes of effective time - exactly 1,000 minutes per day.
this maps so cleanly to 10 minutes = 1%
I made a video explaining the core philosophy: https://youtu.be/OdlNA13lISc
so I built myself a simple widget I call Diem. (like Carpe Diem)
it's not really an app - just a simple widget, no buttons or any interaction whatsoever. it has a single purpose of telling you the time.
here's my experience from just one day of using the widget and my reactions:
- I finished a long meeting and saw it took 10% - "Dang, what a waste of time!"
- I had a productive coding session and saw it took only 4% - "Wow! I can output up to 25x this amount of code in a day. that's interesting"
- I walked my dog for 12% - "That was a good one!"
why this is so impactful is because it really helped me measure relative productivity.
for example, I walked my dog longer than I spent in a meeting. that's an interesting insight in itself. but more importantly, I would definitely avoid long meetings because I would just be thinking this is time I could be walking my dog instead!
now sure you *can* measure in minutes. but hear me out.
if I say "I had nearly 2 hours of meetings, then 40 minutes of work and then I walked my dog for over 2 hours"
but that does not intuitively translate in my head to the ratios of each part of my day.
how does it compare to each other? how does it compare to my whole day?
after all remember I allocated 16 hours and 40 minutes of effective time, or 16 and 2/3rd.
am I going to divide 40 minutes by 16 and a 2/3rd hours? or even by 24 hours?
should I divide by 1440 minutes instead?
but with Diem it just magically sorts everything in my head.
1% - I can do this 100 times a day.
10% - I can do this 10 times a day.
it helps me figure out what I should cut or remove altogether from my life, but also how much more I can do if I push myself.
I'm happy to share the widget with whomever likes to try it!