Day two of my time tracking exercise (yesterday’s is here).
6:40 My alarm rings. I try to pop out of bed ASAP to get ready for the day but it’s not easy because I’m a little tired (yes, believe it or not – because I woke up several times during the night from the most bizarre dreams. I took magnesium before bed for the first time Sunday night, which supposedly helps you have a deeper sleep but I did read that it could cause strange dreams and did it EVER. In one of my dreams, I realized that I had gone to bed too early and I had to teach a second class at night so I had to quickly set everything up even though I was already in a ponytail and glasses — lol — and then my Zoom microphone didn’t work so I had to speak to my class through a rotary phone…yeah). I get my morning going.
7:00 Davening.
7:35 Get ready to leave.
7:40 Walk to the train and commute to work. On the train, I read more about Prague.
8:45 Get to work. Eat my yogurt, answer some emails. I see that it’s going to be a really light work day today (no clients or groups) which doesn’t happen often, and I plan to use downtime to make progress on the ASRM mental health modules.
9:20 I call a friend in Israel and we talk for a bit.
9:45 Back to work. The next few hours are all about calls, emails, and ASRM videos.
12:00 Lunch break. I call a friend as I leave the office building, but she doesn’t answer so I leave a message. I plug myself into today’s episode of the Ben Shapiro Show, then move briskly along to the pizza store for lunch. Yummy. I power walk back to the office (Maps says I have an 18 minute walk each way and that’s about right).
1:00 At my desk. More calls and emails, and more headway on the ASRM stuff.
3:45 Mincha.
4:00 A coworker and I meet on Zoom for a run-through of the poster presentations we are giving at a virtual conference later this month.
4:15 More work stuff.
5:10 I leave the office for Home Depot, where I need to copy my hall key. (Actually, I was there last week but they made a mistake with my order. Oh, well.)
5:25 I leave Home Depot for the train station, and home. I do not do anything productive on the train.
6:45 I walk from the train station to my parents’ house to pick up a few things from my room. While there, I eat a bowl of Life cereal (my fave) and ask my mother to pretty please bring home leftovers from the sheva brachos she is cohosting tonight.
7:15 I return to my apartment and put supper in the oven (pre-breaded drumsticks with sweet potatoes).
7:35 While supper bakes, I sit down to my computer for life admin – filing an FSA claim, looking up dates for exhibits I want to go to, writing up this DITL so far.
8:25 Supper is almost ready, so I challenge myself to put in a burst of teaching prep for Sunday.
8:35 I’ve added a few more slides to my deck, and it’s supper time.
9:00 Supper is done, back to my slide deck.
9:40 I’m almost there, time to start winding down for the night. (I’m never this early, I’m going to get more sleep this week purely due to the observer effect and I’m not complaining).
10:15 Lights out.
I love what you’re sharing here! Is this how your actual diary looked? If I were to do this time-tracking exercise, how do I do it? What kind of notes did you write down in the moment? How did you manage to accurately track the timing – with a stopwatch, constantly writing down the time, or something else?
I’m looking forward to trying it!
Yay, I’m so glad you’re enjoying! This post is exactly how I wrote it in real time (with maybe a few notes added afterwards). I wrote down the start time for each activity as I moved through the day. I just did it in my Notes app (I started in an actual notebook but this way was much easier). Since I was writing everything down, I actually stayed a lot more focused throughout the day than I normally would have (I wrote more about this in the post I’ll share on Friday), so I didn’t have too many space-outs with nothing to document.