As 2020 came to a close, I wanted to do more measuring. Lifelogging as some call it. I wanted to understand more about my work habits, my time sinks and maybe look how I can improve and maybe find areas where I can actually simplify my efforts. Maybe I spend too much time in Mail.app and other tiny details. While I plan on writing a bit more about ‘time’ in a future post, I wanted to start by talking about writing. I wrote last May, “I am a Writer” which focused on all of the writing I do off of this blog and my denial and anxiety around feeling as if I had hit a writing rut when in actuality, I was writing more than ever, just not on this blog. I was writing for YouTube videos, blogs, magazines, newsletters and emails and office documents. I was writing constantly!
January 1st, I decided to start tracking this automatically and I’m blown away by how much data I create daily and wanted to share some numbers with you.
Today was my highest output today by words. It was reporting day and I woke up today with the intention of getting every unread email off my list and I succeeded:
Here are the last 90 days:
One thing you can easily derive from this is I have been very good about taking weekends off. I try very hard to unplug and by the peaks and valleys, I mostly succeed. There was a time in January where I was working every day. Also, once a week I pass 8,000 words. These are usually my hustle days where I wake up feeling very rested and I commit to a 6AM to (as of this writing) 7PM day and while the work isn’t off my plate forever, it does allow me to feel like I got something done.
Finally, in the last 90 days, I’ve written 329,000 words. WOW. A novel is 30-50 thousand words so every 90 days, I compose just over 8 novels worth of text. Truly staggering when you think of it. This does break down by hours as well but only by the day. I can’t export hours or I would love to know what my most productive hour of the day is. Today, it was 10AM.
Am I using my time efficiently? Well, that is TBD but I doubt many people are writing this much every day and I hope the people I work with appreciate my attention to detail and thoroughness and over-communication I try to do to keep everyone in sync.