Illustration by Rina Zenyuk
Logs and GTD
It should be noted that my hobby for logging time is a spontaneous thing. I did not immerse myself in the history of time management, and when a friend advised me to read This Strange Life by Daniil Granin, I was surprised to find there the story of a man who began logging his time back in 1916. Alexander Alexandrovich Lyubishchev, a Soviet biologist and entomologist, kept records of his time for 56 years, from 26 until his death. He did not have a smartphone with a tracker at hand, so he mainly took into account and planned his most important time - work. Even if you are not going to log your time, I would advise you to read either Granin's This Strange Life, or, without unnecessary fiction, a fragment of Lyubishchev's manuscript titled “Such a voluntary hard labor” posthumously published in Chemistry and Life in December 1976 ... And it is important to note that Lyubishchev did what I don’t do - he planned work for the future. So far, I only measure interest for the sake of and proceed from the general ideas “it would be good”.
The results of measurements and self-observations turned out to be divided into two groups - obvious and not so obvious. The obvious one is the disappearance of the "Road" column - when the workplace is in the next room, and not an hour away, there is no point in logging the movement there. The "Social Activities" followed - the get-togethers became virtual at best. As expected, the “Work” column has grown - you work more concentrated in the office, but this growth is almost not noticeable. Because of the same effect, the "Sleep" column has grown - when you can lie down to take a nap or ignore the alarm clock, and this will not affect the work process in any way, the weight of values in the mind changes, and you will no longer be able to boast of a six-hour sleep on weekdays. The time spent on "Household affairs" has also predictably increased - earlier you drop into the store on the way from work, but now it's a separate trip,which, moreover, you often want to stretch. The appearance of the new column "Walking" is also difficult to call unexpected - after several months at home, the desire to break out is normal, and if earlier walks were referred to as "Idleness", now it turned out to be reasonable to single them out in a separate, not condemned category.
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The main surprise was the realization of the need for reading. In pre-quarantine mode, I read on public transport (tracked "The Road") and in parallel with lunch at work (tracked "Food"). And in the world of self-isolation, these activities have disappeared. And, since reading was counted as "Idleness" for me, and ideally I would like to eliminate the harmful types of waste of time, it turned out that I practically stopped reading. And, you know, it's a very unpleasant, cold, numbing sensation. So I had to allow myself entertaining reading. But, since it can hardly be called useful, it remains in the “Idleness” category, which explains the growth of this category in the fall and, at the same time, does not seem like an absolutely accurate solution. From the good - at the end of the year the category "Gathering to work" disappeared, wasting time at breakfast and dulling on the phone.
Game Category - Idleness
I had a hypothesis about the relationship between the proportions of time spent with mood. But first, accurate measurements seem to require keeping a mood diary as well. And secondly, the data that I see rather confirms the hypothesis "bought interesting games on sale and played."
The benefits of such measurements in general should be noted separately. The usual reaction to a statement of spending money or time for a year is "I couldn't spend so much!" you can experiment on yourself. Simple and inconspicuous waste of time today turns into hundreds of hours lost in a year. The realization of this fact is a curious and useful feeling.
The fact that the results for some of the categories coincide at two time intervals means that it will be interesting to look at their behavior in the future. It wouldn’t have happened as in the joke “for the sprint before last, we planned 40 story points. Completed 35. We planned 45 story points for the last sprint. Completed 35. We are planning 50 story points for this sprint! "
And finally, if someone is interested in the technical details, then everything is simple. A smartphone with a tracker application installed (in my case Toggl) is always next to me. At each change of activity, it is opened and the change is logged. There are no difficulties or inconveniences. In about 5% of cases, I forget to switch the tracker, but this is not scary, since the events are fresh in memory, then they are restored with good accuracy.
Habr
In general, the year continued the trend of 2019. Let me remind you that then the scientific and pop hubs were taken out to non-core ones, and I switched instead of working on a schedule to ordered materials, since there were enough of them then. For a change, before quarantine, I was invited to write several posts on corporate blogs, and these were the only materials that came out on Habré earlier than on LJ.
Now, from the outside, the benefits of the schedule are visible even better - the task set to itself disciplined, and the thought did not arise "why am I doing this at all?" Since I have been “drowning” for a long time for being proactive, there is an answer to the question, quite expressible by the quote “Why” - not a Shnyrov word. Shnyrovskie words or "must", or "for fun"... But in general, in such conditions, I am surprised that the number of posts turned out to be even slightly higher than in the last year.
LJ
In last year's report, I wrote about the problem of material erosion, and 2020 showed that this problem was met with open arms - there are even more posts about cinema than before. And I do not feel any remorse - thanks to cooperation with the administration of the LiveJournal, I looked at a lot of excellent pictures, which I wrote with pleasure reviews, where I told what I think without any restrictions.
104 posts, two a week, seem like a record, but the archive says that in 2017 there were as many as 107. Then I was able to work in the format of writing something serious for Monday and light for Friday. And here there is a curious paradox - I consider 2017 the worst year in my blogging / popularization activities, but precisely because I was not invited anywhere and was not offered to write something to order, I was able to concentrate and make the most of the materials.
About what was done
It so happened that the horrors of 2020 have missed me so far. IT work turned out to be in an industry that was not affected by the coronavirus crisis, and I only sympathized in the chats of testers with those who were laid off or those who were being cut. Of course, events and orders for scientific and pop materials have fallen off since spring, but in 2017 it was worse without any global crisis, so there is no desire to complain. The departure of everything and everyone online in my case led to the activation of the YouTube channelWe celebrated Cosmonautics Day online, and then I started streaming on Saturday evenings - we played the Kerbal Space Program, watched the strategy managers of space agencies, regularly arrange interesting reconstructions in Orbiter, and now we are replaying the campaign in Children of a Dead Earth. The main joy of this year is that Roskosmos drew attention to bloggers, a trip to the Vostochny and Sea Launch cosmodromes entered the top personal events of the year (I would write “headed”, but the birth of a second child has to be put in the first place according to strictly formal criteria) ...
All this activity would not have been possible without the selfless support of my wife - her work is imperceptibly present in every piece of mine that she edited, and in the silence against which my streams go.
Thanks for reading and / or watching me this year. Ideas, comments, questions, thanks, curses and other feedback are accepted in any way convenient for you - in the comments, in a personal, Vkontakte or Facebook.