Categories: life

RSS - Atom - Subscribe via email

Looking at my time data from 2012 to 2025

| quantified, time, life

Assumed audience:

  • @tagomago, who was curious about what a typical weekday looked like before I became a parent, following up on my post
  • people who track time, especially my fellow Quantified Self geeks
  • my future self, looking back even further on time and change

This is a long post without any particularly ground-breaking insights; more along the lines of "water is wet" (taking care of a kid reduces free time, to no one's surprise). I suppose not a lot of people have 13+ years of time data to analyze, though, so there's some coolness in that. Also, I'm a little proud of the fact that I got the graphs to show up nicely even under EWW, so they work without Javascript. If you view this post on my blog with Javascript enabled, there should be user-interface niceties like being able to switch between years.

I wrote a web-based time tracker back in late 2011 because I was curious about how I was actually using my time. I'd already started planning my 5-year experiment with semi-retirement. I knew that time-tracking was going to be useful for that, especially since I figured consulting was going to be part of it. I had been tracking my time with Tap Log for Android, but writing my own system allowed me to fit it to the way I wanted it to work. 2012 was my first full year of data with it. My time data includes a little bit of my work at IBM, all of my experiment with semi-retirement, and my time as a parent. Time-tracking was something that a number of people in the Quantified Self community were also exploring, so I had fun bouncing ideas and visualizations off other people. At some point, I nudged my categories a little closer to the time use studies I read. (Ooh, I should revisit these…)

I use a hierarchy of categories. Each time segment can have only one category, even if I might combine something like childcare and biking. The hierarchy lets me report at the high level while also letting me break things down further. I can add a note to a segment in order to capture even more detail, like the way that clocking in from my Org Mode tasks automatically fills in the time tracker's note with the task name. It takes me just a few taps to record my data most of the time. If I need to backdate something, I can use a couple more taps to select common time offsets (say, around 5 minutes ago). I can also type in some text to select an uncommon category or specify a different offset.

The data isn't 100% perfect, of course. Sometimes I created an entry a few minutes late or guessed when something started. Sometimes I forgot to track when I went to sleep or when I woke up. Despite the occasionally messy data, it gives me a pretty good idea of the rough categories of my day.

For the time graphs below, each column is one day, starting at midnight. All times are displayed in the America/Toronto time zone, with the occasional indent or outdent because of daylight savings time. Legend:

pinkA+ (childcare)
yellowBusiness - Connect
redBusiness / Work
greenDiscretionary - Play
blueDiscretionary - Productive
dark blueDiscretionary - Productive - Emacs
yellowDiscretionary - Social
purplePersonal
graySleep
orangeUnpaid work

If you click on the graph images, you should be able to get the SVG for each year, which will let you hover over segments for more details in the tooltips. Each SVG is about 1-4 MB, so I didn't want to include them all inline.

Here are some overall graphs of each year, as a sample weekday, and some notes on what was going on in my life then.

2012

2012

Sample weekday: 2012-04-25

22:06 - 06:32: Sleep21:33 - 22:06: Discretionary - Productive - Latin21:03 - 21:33: Unpaid work - Cook20:03 - 21:03: Personal - Walk - Other19:45 - 20:03: Discretionary - Social19:18 - 19:45: Personal - Routines19:18 - 19:18: Personal - Routines18:31 - 19:18: Unpaid work - Tidy up17:08 - 18:31: Personal - Bike08:55 - 17:08: Business - Earn - Consulting - E1 - General08:19 - 08:55: Personal - Bike07:01 - 08:19: Personal - Routines22:23 - 07:01: Sleep

In February 2012, I started my experiment with semi-retirement, shifting from working for IBM to consulting for a couple of clients. My week was still fairly typical, since I planned for 4-5 days of consulting each week. I usually biked or took the subway to the office, where I did some coding or consulting around enterprise social computing.

I wanted to experiment with different business models, so I also started doing some professional sketchnoting and illustration. I guess people liked stick figures. I did a few events here and there, but the semi- part of my semi-retirement was mostly consulting around enterprise social computing, collaboration and technology adoption, Javascript prototyping, and SQL queries.

2012 yearly review

2013

2013

Sample weekday: 2013-04-26

23:37 - 10:17: Sleep23:12 - 23:37: Discretionary - Play - Read - Fiction22:50 - 23:12: Personal - Routines20:50 - 22:50: Discretionary - Family20:33 - 20:50: Personal - Eat - Dinner20:11 - 20:33: Discretionary - Family19:07 - 20:11: Discretionary - Productive - Writing18:57 - 19:07: Unpaid work - Cook18:28 - 18:57: Personal - Walk - Other18:01 - 18:28: Discretionary - Productive - Writing17:00 - 18:01: Business - Build - Paperwork15:47 - 17:00: Business - Connect - Connecting12:00 - 15:47: Business - Earn - Consulting - E1 - General11:20 - 12:00: Unpaid work - Groceries09:06 - 11:20: Business - Earn - Consulting - E1 - General08:39 - 09:06: Personal - Routines23:52 - 08:39: Sleep

I continued to do a lot of consulting, but I started letting myself do some more fun stuff like Emacs and hanging out. The offset part towards the end of the year is when we went to the Philippines to visit family and attend a friend's wedding.

2013 yearly review

2014

2014

Sample weekday: 2014-04-21

23:38 - 00:18: Personal - Routines23:18 - 23:38: Discretionary - Play - Read - Blogs23:12 - 23:18: Personal - Routines19:44 - 23:12: Discretionary - Play - LEGO Marvel19:20 - 19:44: Discretionary - Productive - Gardening19:00 - 19:20: Personal - Eat - Dinner18:27 - 19:00: Discretionary - Play - LEGO Marvel18:25 - 18:27: Discretionary - Productive - Emacs18:23 - 18:25: Discretionary - Play - LEGO Marvel18:00 - 18:23: Unpaid work - Cook17:46 - 18:00: Unpaid work - Cook16:52 - 17:46: Discretionary - Productive - Emacs16:49 - 16:52: Discretionary - Productive - Emacs16:48 - 16:49: Unpaid work - Cook16:13 - 16:48: Discretionary - Productive - Emacs15:32 - 16:13: Discretionary - Productive - Emacs14:23 - 15:32: Business - Build - Delegation13:57 - 14:23: Business - Connect - Connecting13:21 - 13:57: Personal - Eat - Lunch13:16 - 13:21: Discretionary - Productive - Latin12:42 - 13:16: Business - Build - Delegation12:14 - 12:42: Discretionary - Productive - Writing09:54 - 12:14: Business - Build - Quantified Awesome09:21 - 09:54: Personal - Routines01:05 - 09:21: Sleep00:42 - 01:05: Personal - Routines23:37 - 00:42: Business - Build - Quantified Awesome

I ratcheted consulting down further and I gave myself permission to work on more of my own things. I enjoyed hanging out at Hacklab.to.

2014 yearly review

2015

2015

Sample weekday: 2015-05-27

23:49 - 07:55: Sleep23:30 - 23:49: Personal - Routines22:09 - 23:30: Discretionary - Play - Relax21:24 - 22:09: Discretionary - Productive - Drawing20:23 - 21:24: Discretionary - Play - Relax20:08 - 20:23: Personal - Routines19:01 - 20:08: Unpaid work - Clean the kitchen18:47 - 19:01: Personal - Eat - Dinner18:08 - 18:47: Unpaid work - Cook16:06 - 18:08: Business - Build - Quantified Awesome14:27 - 16:06: Business - Build - Quantified Awesome12:02 - 14:27: Discretionary - Play - Ni no Kuni11:37 - 12:02: Personal - Eat - Lunch10:27 - 11:37: Business - Build - Quantified Awesome08:59 - 10:27: Business - Build - Quantified Awesome07:24 - 08:59: Personal - Routines00:36 - 07:24: Sleep23:11 - 00:36: Personal - Routines

I continued to hang out at Hacklab and work on my own stuff, with a little bit of consulting. Towards the latter part of 2015 and the early part of 2016, I felt quite tired because of pregnancy, so I spent a lot more time relaxing.

2015 yearly review

2016

2016

Sample weekday: 2016-04-21

23:46 - 00:15: A+ - Childcare22:51 - 23:46: Sleep22:14 - 22:51: A+ - Childcare21:29 - 22:14: Personal - Routines21:26 - 21:29: Sleep21:14 - 21:26: A+ - Childcare21:11 - 21:14: Personal - Routines21:01 - 21:11: Unpaid work - Clean the kitchen20:40 - 21:01: A+ - Childcare20:20 - 20:40: Personal - Eat - Dinner19:56 - 20:20: Discretionary - Productive - Coding19:26 - 19:56: A+ - Childcare19:04 - 19:26: Discretionary - Productive - Drawing18:23 - 19:04: A+ - Childcare17:57 - 18:23: A+ - Childcare17:27 - 17:57: Business - Build - Paperwork16:57 - 17:27: Discretionary - Social16:26 - 16:57: Personal - Routines16:11 - 16:26: A+ - Childcare15:48 - 16:11: Discretionary - Productive - Tracking14:57 - 15:48: Personal - Walk - Other14:30 - 14:57: A+ - Childcare13:48 - 14:30: Discretionary - Productive - Coding13:00 - 13:48: Discretionary - Productive - Coding12:55 - 13:00: Discretionary - Productive - Coding12:47 - 12:55: Discretionary - Productive - Coding12:27 - 12:47: A+ - Childcare12:27 - 12:27: Discretionary - Productive - Coding12:11 - 12:27: Business - Connect - Connecting11:26 - 12:11: Unpaid work - Laundry11:22 - 11:26: Sleep11:22 - 11:22: Unpaid work - Clean the kitchen11:20 - 11:22: A+ - Childcare11:03 - 11:20: A+ - Childcare11:03 - 11:03: Personal - Plan10:13 - 11:03: Personal - Routines09:56 - 10:13: A+ - Childcare05:30 - 09:56: Sleep05:02 - 05:30: A+ - Childcare02:45 - 05:02: Sleep02:38 - 02:45: A+ - Childcare02:38 - 02:38: A+ - Childcare02:28 - 02:38: A+ - Childcare00:10 - 02:28: Sleep23:49 - 00:10: Sleep

In February, A+ was born. Here's the obligatory visualization of how my sleep shattered into a million pieces and childcare took over my days and nights. If you have ever been the primary caregiver of an infant, you'll know what this is like.

Year Sleep % Avg hours / day
2012 34.6 8.3
2013 36.7 8.8
2014 36.9 8.9
2015 38.1 9.1
2016 34.9 8.4
2017 32.5 7.8

… Sure didn't feel like 8.4 hours a day. Not enough continuous sleep, definitely foggy-brained. Although to be fair, babies also sleep a lot, and I tried to sleep during that time too.

Towards the end of the year, we took A+ to the Philippines to see family. We tried to do the usual short layover and that was miserable because of sleep deprivation, so our other flights included an overnight layover.

I decided that doing my yearly review twice a year was a bit excessive, so I moved to doing it in August for my birthday. This year was split between life as a 32-year-old and a 33-year-old.

2017

2017

Sample weekday: 2017-04-25

23:49 - 01:03: A+ - Childcare23:04 - 23:49: A+ - Childcare22:48 - 23:04: Personal - Eat - Dinner22:32 - 22:48: A+ - Childcare22:19 - 22:32: Personal - Routines20:11 - 22:19: Sleep19:39 - 20:11: A+ - Childcare19:10 - 19:39: A+ - Childcare18:52 - 19:10: Personal - Routines18:48 - 18:52: A+ - Childcare18:12 - 18:48: A+ - Childcare16:44 - 18:12: Unpaid work - Subway14:56 - 16:44: Personal - Walk - Other13:53 - 14:56: Unpaid work - Subway12:36 - 13:53: A+ - Childcare12:27 - 12:36: A+ - Childcare12:03 - 12:27: Personal - Walk - Other11:34 - 12:03: A+ - Childcare11:22 - 11:34: Personal - Routines10:55 - 11:22: Unpaid work - Clean the kitchen10:30 - 10:55: Personal - Eat - Breakfast09:33 - 10:30: Unpaid work - Cook09:28 - 09:33: A+ - Childcare02:31 - 09:28: Sleep01:20 - 02:31: Discretionary - Play - Relax00:58 - 01:20: Discretionary - Productive - Tracking00:43 - 00:58: Personal - Plan00:38 - 00:43: A+ - Childcare00:25 - 00:38: A+ - Childcare00:23 - 00:25: Personal - Plan00:08 - 00:23: A+ - Childcare23:38 - 00:08: Personal - Plan

More childcare. We often went to playgrounds, libraries, EarlyON early childhood centres, museums, and the Ontario Science Centre. I often needed a nap in the evenings.

Another trip to the Philippines. The very regular section was probably when I didn't have a reliable way of updating my time tracker. (Yearly review split between life as a 33-year-old and a 34-year-old)

2018

2018

Sample weekday: 2018-05-08

23:26 - 00:35: A+ - Childcare22:35 - 23:26: A+ - Childcare22:31 - 22:35: Personal - Routines22:02 - 22:31: Unpaid work - Clean the kitchen18:25 - 22:02: A+ - Childcare18:10 - 18:25: A+ - Childcare17:39 - 18:10: A+ - Childcare17:31 - 17:39: Personal - Routines17:23 - 17:31: A+ - Childcare17:12 - 17:23: A+ - Childcare17:04 - 17:12: A+ - Childcare16:31 - 17:04: Unpaid work - Tidy up15:10 - 16:31: Business - Earn - Consulting - E1 - General14:36 - 15:10: A+ - Childcare13:19 - 14:36: Business - Earn - Consulting - E1 - General09:03 - 13:19: A+ - Childcare00:37 - 09:03: Sleep00:19 - 00:37: A+ - Childcare21:24 - 00:19: A+ - Childcare

We went on two trips to the Philippines. My dad died during the first one, and the second one was to keep my mom company. (Yearly review split between life as a 34-year-old and a 35-year-old)

2019

2019

Sample weekday: 2019-04-25

23:53 - 08:34: Sleep23:43 - 23:53: Sleep21:54 - 23:43: Discretionary - Family21:45 - 21:54: Personal - Routines20:40 - 21:45: A+ - Childcare20:22 - 20:40: Personal - Routines08:45 - 20:22: A+ - Childcare08:13 - 08:45: Personal - Routines23:19 - 08:13: Sleep

Sometimes I paid a babysitter so I could do some consulting, but A+ usually didn't like being away from me, so I just didn't do that much. This year was also our last trip to the Philippines before COVID changed the world. (Yearly review split between life as a 35-year-old and a 36-year-old)

2020

2020

Sample weekday: 2020-04-28

23:31 - 00:15: Sleep23:30 - 23:31: Personal - Routines23:03 - 23:30: Discretionary - Play - Read - Fiction22:56 - 23:03: Discretionary - Productive - Writing21:52 - 22:56: Discretionary - Play - Read - Fiction20:45 - 21:52: A+ - Childcare20:25 - 20:45: Discretionary - Productive - Coding20:17 - 20:25: Discretionary - Family19:47 - 20:17: Personal - Routines17:56 - 19:47: A+ - Childcare16:26 - 17:56: Unpaid work - Cook09:01 - 16:26: A+ - Childcare07:02 - 09:01: A+ - Childcare07:01 - 07:02: Sleep01:24 - 07:01: Sleep00:20 - 01:24: Discretionary - Social23:50 - 00:20: Discretionary - Productive - Coding

I started staying up to try to get stuff done. This was sometimes tricky to get right. If I stayed up too late and then A+ woke up early, I got cranky. I did much less consulting. The two dark blue lines towards the later part of the year represent EmacsConf. (Yearly review split between life as a 36-year-old and a 37-year-old)

2021

2021

Sample weekday: 2021-04-29

23:37 - 00:01: Discretionary - Productive - Gardening23:23 - 23:37: Discretionary - Productive - Coding23:11 - 23:23: Personal - Routines21:30 - 23:11: A+ - Childcare20:30 - 21:30: Personal - Routines19:44 - 20:30: Discretionary - Productive - Emacs18:33 - 19:44: A+ - Childcare18:25 - 18:33: Personal - Routines18:23 - 18:25: A+ - Childcare17:23 - 18:23: Personal - Routines16:52 - 17:23: Unpaid work - Clean the kitchen16:32 - 16:52: Unpaid work - Cook09:51 - 16:32: A+ - Childcare08:47 - 09:51: Personal - Routines01:31 - 08:47: Sleep01:11 - 01:31: Personal - Routines23:42 - 01:11: Discretionary - Productive - Emacs

Still staying up to try to have some me-time. The dark blue boxes in the second half of the year show that I started taking a more active role in organizing EmacsConf, mostly by coding stuff late at night. (Yearly review split between life as a 37-year-old and a 38-year-old)

2022

2022

Sample weekday: 2022-04-25

23:21 - 00:15: Discretionary - Productive - Writing22:50 - 23:21: Discretionary - Productive - Emacs20:36 - 22:50: A+ - Childcare20:09 - 20:36: Personal - Routines10:20 - 20:09: A+ - Childcare00:26 - 10:20: Sleep00:24 - 00:26: Personal - Routines21:24 - 00:24: A+ - Childcare

A+ shifted to staying up late too, so I adapted by doing less. Trying to get her to go to bed earlier just resulted in grumpiness and crying. (Sometimes I was the one crying.)

I did a lot more automation for EmacsConf. Sometimes it was because she was attending virtual grade 1 during the daytime, and sometimes it was because she was just chilling out watching videos in the evening. (Yearly review split between life as a 38-year-old and a 39-year-old)

2023

2023

Sample weekday: 2023-04-25

23:23 - 08:05: Sleep21:41 - 23:23: A+ - Childcare21:11 - 21:41: Personal - Routines13:44 - 21:11: A+ - Childcare13:29 - 13:44: Discretionary - Productive - Emacs13:16 - 13:29: Personal - Plan13:02 - 13:16: A+ - Childcare12:47 - 13:02: Business - Earn - Consulting - E1 - General12:45 - 12:47: A+ - Childcare12:34 - 12:45: Business - Earn - Consulting - E1 - General08:34 - 12:34: A+ - Childcare07:28 - 08:34: Personal - Routines23:22 - 07:28: Sleep

A+ started grade 2. We had to wait a little while to get our exemption from synchronous learning approved, so we made an effort to attend school in the beginning. We eventually got the exemption, though. (Yearly review split between life as a 39-year-old and a 40-year-old)

2024

2024

Sample weekday: 2024-04-25

23:06 - 00:36: Sleep20:38 - 23:06: A+ - Childcare20:08 - 20:38: Personal - Routines19:38 - 20:08: Unpaid work - Clean the kitchen08:40 - 19:38: A+ - Childcare08:00 - 08:40: Personal - Routines00:54 - 08:00: Sleep23:15 - 00:54: Discretionary - Play - Read - Fiction

A+ started grade 3. Our application for an exemption from synchronous learning wasn't approved, so A+'s schedule (and mine) tended to follow the school schedule except for the days when I say, hey, let's just go on an informal field trip. I'm glad A+ decided to get on board with waking up at around 7 AM fairly consistently instead of sleeping in. The graph also shows the steadiness of the pink Childcare segments during the 11AM-12PM lunch breaks. Knowing when I'm likely to be interrupted by an armful of kiddo does help me use the morning and afternoon breaks a little more efficiently, although having 1-1.5 hours to think can still feel a little short if I'm trying to do some programming.

Part of this year was covered by my life as a 40-year-old yearly review. I'll write my "life as a 41-year-old" post in August this year.

2025

2025

Sample weekday: 2025-04-10

23:17 - 06:55: Sleep22:19 - 23:17: Personal - Routines18:22 - 22:19: A+ - Childcare17:52 - 18:22: Personal - Routines17:30 - 17:52: Unpaid work - Clean the kitchen14:44 - 17:30: A+ - Childcare14:37 - 14:44: Personal - Routines13:54 - 14:37: Discretionary - Productive - Coding12:42 - 13:54: Discretionary - Productive - Emacs12:10 - 12:42: Discretionary - Productive - Writing12:04 - 12:10: Discretionary - Productive - Emacs11:01 - 12:04: A+ - Childcare10:58 - 11:01: Discretionary - Productive - Emacs10:48 - 10:58: Personal - Routines09:54 - 10:48: Personal - Walk - Other09:37 - 09:54: A+ - Childcare08:27 - 09:37: Discretionary - Productive - Music06:57 - 08:27: A+ - Childcare23:32 - 06:57: Sleep

I started prioritizing practising piano and going for a good long walk at some point in the day, both of which feel very nice. I still usually handle A+'s recess and lunch breaks, but W-'s retired now, so sometimes he handles A+'s lunch while I do things.

How has my time changed over the years?

I usually do a quick check of my time by looking at the category totals and percentages during my monthly and yearly reviews, but seeing it as a day-by-day view like this makes it easier to feel the flow of things, including when I tend to stay up late. (Revenge bedtime procrastination strikes again.)

Still, category totals make it easier to see high-level changes over time. Here's a graph of average hours per day per high-level category per year.

I can see that:

  • childcare mostly came out of my consulting, personal, and play time
  • I've managed to get back to doing more productive stuff and Emacs stuff

Here's the hours-per-day.py script I used to analyze it, using Pandas to sum it up, Matplot to graph it, and mpld3 to add some Javascript interaction so we can hover over points to get the label and value. I wrote a little SetViewbox plugin so that the graph could be more responsive.

Fragmentation

My life is still fragmented, but I'm slowly becoming more okay with this. The general advice is, of course, to try to consolidate some focus time, but my life doesn't work that way. Besides, it's fragmented because the kiddo likes to spend time with me, which is wonderful.

I liked this quote from Eleanor Coppola from this Living with Literature interview:1

The men artists I knew had a studio, and they went out to their studio, and they spent the day, and worked, and then they came back. I once read a book by Judy Chicago, who interviewed all these women artists, and they made their art on the back porch, they made it on top of the washing machine, they made it next to the kitchen sink, and they made it anywhere they could, for the hour and a half while their kid was taking a nap, and for the two hours while they were at the play group. They made it in between. It wasn’t, like, you get to make art for eight hours. You make art in 20-minute snatches, and you don’t, like, fiddle around. I know one time I went to see Francis in his working room, and he had his pencils all laid out, and his espresso there, and there was this whole little ritual of getting into yourself and into your work. There was no time [for women] for the ritual of getting into your work! You just snapped into that taking 10 minutes and making 3 lines on your drawing or whatever was possible. It wasn’t the same as the way men worked. And that’s how women got their work done.

This reminds me of the reflections on interruptibility in Meditations for Mortals (Oliver Burkeman, 2024): yes, try to ringfence three to four hours of your day for focused time, but don't try to control too much of your life; stay distractible, don't fight life, give your full attention once your focus has already been diverted. It also reminds me of Good Mom on Paper (edited by Stacey May Fowles and Jen Sookfong Lee, 2022); there are lots of other people who are finding their way through the "Mom! Mom! Mom!" phase. (A+ still has a finely-tuned attention detector. She can sense the moment I begin to think about something and interrupt it with "Mom, look at this!" even when W- is right there beside her.)

A+ grows more independent every year. It's like life is slowly easing me into this independence too. 2022 looked different from 2025, and 2028 will be different too. I used to have 5-10 minute snippets of time (still do). Now I occasionally get 1-hour chunks. Eventually I'll have 3-hour chunks again. I know from my experiment with semi-retirement that time isn't the thing holding me back from making a useful website or writing a book or saving the world, so that's actually kind of liberating. It can just be about trying things out and seeing where I want to go with that.

Sleep

One of the things I've learned is how much of my day depends on feeling well-rested. When I've slept well, I can parent better and I can take advantage of little pockets of me-time better.

It's surprisingly tricky to get my sleep sorted out. My sleep isn't as fragmented as it used to be in the early days of parenting A+, but it's still a little challenging. These days, I usually start nudging A+ towards bed at 9 PM. I'm still an integral part of her bedtime routine. Sometimes she stays up because she wants to chat or improvise stories, and unless I'm super tired, I like to spend that cozy time with her. I snuggle her until I think she's fallen asleep. Sometimes I try to slip away too early and she sleepily asks for more hugs, so then I snuggle her for another ten or fifteen minutes. I try to stay awake because whenever I fall asleep in her twin bed, we're both a bit tired and cranky in the morning. After A+'s finally asleep, I call my mom to check on her. Sometimes I do a bit of reading or drawing as my personal time.

I can remind myself not to stay up late reading because then I'll get too little sleep and then I'll feel tired. I can find time to read the next day. Come to think of it, this is what I tell A+ too, and just like me, she also finds it hard to put books down.

I could also get a bit more sleep by accepting that A+ will probably wake up at 7:30 or so, and set my alarm for 7:25 instead of 6:55. She usually likes a lot of snuggles before finally waking up, though, so starting the snuggles early in the morning gives us more of a leisurely start to the day.

If I go to bed at about 10 or 10:30 PM, I usually wake up before my alarm goes off. If I move some of my personal reading and writing to that time (RSS, books, etc.), then I can swap out some of the less-useful scrolling through Reddit and start the day better.

Other thoughts

Text from sketch

Time over the years

  • Minutes are not all the same
    • 8.4 hours of sleep, 2 hours of me-time:
      • fragmented < all together
    • family time: 0-18 > 18→
  • How much time I have & how much time I feel I have are two different things.
  • It's okay to have downtime. No sense in grumping at myself about it.
  • Energy matters. Sleep is my foundation for everything else
  • Time comes from somewhere. There's time for everything I really want, just not all at once. Constraints clarify choices. If I want to do more of something, I need to change something else.
  • I like a small, leisurely life.

sachachua.com/2025-04-29-02

Tracking my time is surprisingly reassuring. I can see that I have time for a few discretionary things, and I can see the trade-offs. More time spent doing one thing means less time spent on another, so it makes my actual priorities clear. In the beginning, I tended to fall back to consulting a lot because it came with clear tasks and the satisfaction of helping other people. I'm happy to see that I'm becoming more comfortable with choosing things like playing piano, going for walks, writing, or working on personal projects, or playing Minecraft with W- and A+.

W- does so much around the house, and we really enjoy the benefits. (Mmm, fresh-baked bagels.) It makes me want to increase my "Unpaid work" time so that I can increase the satisfaction I feel from helping improve the household. If I can tempt A+ along (say, cooking or gardening), then that would be an effective way to shift that time around. When I switch from "Personal - Routines" to "Unpaid work - Clean the kitchen," it feels nice. I know it'll add up.

When I don't feel particularly energetic or focused, I've learned to be kind to myself and just chill out with a book or my iPad, or do some tidying around the house. Sometimes I have a nap. No point in grumping at myself about it. I'm learning that I enjoy having a simple, leisurely sort of life, without feeling like I need an internal taskmaster. When I do have an idea, I'm fine with going with it even if there are lots of other things on my to-do list from before. As long as nothing urgently needs to be done, there's room to play, and it's easier to work on stuff I'm curious about or care about, even if it might not be the theoretically optimal way to use that bit of time.

Do I want to find time for the activities I used to spend time on before?

I don't think I'll go back to my pre-parenting socializing any time soon. I miss bumping into interesting ideas and people at tech meetups and Hacklab, and hosting people for tea, but it's okay. We're still taking COVID precautions, so we don't hang out indoors. The weather's warming up so maybe people will be outside more. I bumped into Andrew Louis at a park the other day. That conversation reminded me that there are lots of wonderful people who don't blog nearly as often as I do (and even I don't write as often as I'd like), so spending time with them (either one-or-one or as part of larger conversations) is the main way to find out about the cool things they've been up to, enjoy that feeling of "I'm glad you exist," and perhaps develop friendships further. Someday, maybe. In the meantime, I like EmacsConf, I occasionally join online meetups, and I've dusted off my feed reader and filled it with people whom I also appreciate.

All my gaming time has shifted over to Minecraft because that's what A+ and W- play. I like playing with them. It's a fun way to spend time together and explore different situations.

I probably won't take up Latin or Japanese again for now. I enjoyed feeling my brain get the hang of something new. At the moment, my brain seems to want to get that from piano practice, so that's fine.

I'd like to sew more. A+ wants more skirts, skorts, and dresses, and she doesn't often find clothes to her liking in the stores. She likes it when I wear a matching skirt, too. If I'm working with stretchy fabric, that means using the serger at home. If I'm working with wovens, I can bring the project to the playground for something tangible to work on while the kids play. At home, it tends to feel like a choice between coding, writing, cooking, tidying, or sewing, and I don't pick sewing very often. At the park, sewing gives me something to do while I listen to other grown-ups chat.

I like what I've shifted my time towards: more time outside, time with family, biking and walking (especially awesome when we're out biking as a family!), more gardening, more writing, more drawing. It's okay that other things moved lower on my list.

How much time does it take to track and analyze time?

It doesn't take a lot of time to capture the data: just a few seconds to tap into my most common categories using my phone. I recently added some Tasker tasks and Google Assistant routines so that I can track common categories by voice ("Hey Google, kitchen"), using face unlock to authorize it in case my hands are full. I've written code to automatically add time use tables to my weekly, monthly, and annual reviews, so that's also straightforward.

This particular analysis took me a couple of extra hours spread over several days.

  • I noticed some entries I wanted to clean up (mostly when I didn't track when I slept), so that took a little time.
  • I wanted to tweak my graph visualization to make it easier to visualize a whole year of data, so I modified it to take up the full width instead of a fixed width, changed the outline to a slightly-transparent version of the category colour, and recoloured the categories based on a palette I picked up from somewhere. This meant I needed to re-figure-out how to modify my web-based tracker, as there were some gaps in my notes.
  • I wanted an Emacs Lisp way to visualize a single day, which meant adding quantified-svg-day and other functions to .

    Then I could define a named Org Babel block like this:

      #+NAME: day-graph
      #+begin_src emacs-lisp  :exports results :var day="2012-04-25"
            (with-temp-file (format "weekday-%s.svg" (substring day 0 4))
                    (svg-print (quantified-svg-day day 'horizontal))
                    (buffer-string))
            (format "#+ATTR_HTML: :style margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0\nSample weekday: %s\n#+ATTR_HTML: :style width:100%%; height: 20px\nfile:weekday-%s.svg" day (substring day 0 4))
      #+end_src
    

    To call it, I can use:

      #+CALL: day-graph(day="2013-04-26")
    

    Next step would be to visualize the data from a start day to and end day, which could be useful for weekly and monthly reviews.

  • I kept wanting to add more thoughts.

I liked reviewing my data, though. Even with just the numbers and graphs, it was a way to revisit those quite different past selves.

This time data works together with other things. I built myself a web-based journal as well–just quick sentences to capture what happened, roughly grouped into categories. That provides a more qualitative view of my day and helps me flesh out the memories.

Can I share my data?

I used to leave quantifiedawesome.com more open to the web. To my amusement, it's even been used in a machine learning research paper, which, after much crunching of data, concluded that I tend to take the subway to things and then come back.2 Anyway, I noticed my time tracker got a bit slower as bots started trying to crawl through the reports, and it occasionally crashed and needed restarting, so I tucked it behind an IP address range restriction. Not really sure what other people would find interesting in my data, anyhow. =)

Other resources

If you like this sort of stuff, you might also want to check out my other posts about time or Quantified Self, or these other people's time analyses:

If you want to start tracking your time, it might be helpful to try it for a short period (a week, a month, whatever) and then see what surprises you. People can track time using all sorts of things: pen and paper, a spreadsheet, a digital calendar, a time-tracking app… It might take a few tries to find something that fits the way you work, and that's okay.

Interactive figures in blog posts with mpld3 was also helpful for figuring out Javascript-enabled charts from Python, for which of course I totally want a smooth Org Mode workflow.

Looking forward to the next few years

Looking forward, I expect childcare to still be a significant portion of my day, but that's all right. It'll wind down all too quickly, so I might as well enjoy it while I'm here. I think I'd like to do maybe 5-15 hours of consulting a month, which is a few hours each week. I enjoy helping my clients explore crazy ideas. Aside from that, there are lots of other things I want to do with my time, and each day feels nicely full. Now that the weather's warming up, I'd like to become even more comfortable with sitting on the porch with a book or a sketch, or going for a walk with A+ to the ice cream store, or wandering around the city checking out playgrounds.

A+ is 9. I am more than halfway to the end of A+'s childhood, and adolescence is around the corner. I have only so many years in this easy stage with W-. My paternal grandmother had dementia towards the end of her life and my mom is dealing with both physical and cognitive decline due to Parkinson's. Tick tock, memento mori, four thousand weeks go by quickly. I'm half-past that mark, too. But it's not a matter to feel despair about or something that should make me try to hang on to this moment too tightly. Keeping track of my time doesn't mean subjecting myself to some kind of Tayloristic time-and-motion study of the sort that dictates how many packages an Amazon warehouse worker must process each hour, out of the urge to wring out every last bit of productivity possible. It's enough, I think, to savour here and now, to laugh at the things I worried about in the past and to accept that future me will also look back and smile.

I wonder what the next few years could look like. I'd like to keep tracking time as a low-effort way to sketch out the shape of my day, to see my revealed preferences and see if they match up with what I value, and to appreciate how little things add up.

Footnotes

2

J. Cüppers and J. Vreeken, "Just Wait for it… Mining Sequential Patterns with Reliable Prediction Delays," 2020 IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM), Sorrento, Italy, 2020, pp. 82-91, doi: 10.1109/ICDM50108.2020.00017.

View org source for this post

A typical weekday

| life, parenting, time

Text and links from sketch

A typical weekday

family time: 11/16 hours, me time: 5/16 hours

  • 7 AM: Morning routines
  • 8 AM: piano practice
  • 9 AM: gardening, recess
  • 10 AM: Walk, braindump
  • 11 AM: Lunch
  • 12 PM: focus time: code, write, draw, read, do stuff
  • 1 PM: tidying, recess
  • 2 PM: writing, hanging out with A+
  • 3 PM: hang out with A+
  • 4 PM: sometimes a play date
  • 5 PM: dinner with W- & A+
  • 6 PM: chores, evening routine
  • 7 PM: hang out with W- and A+: Minecraft; watching; Pictionary, other games
  • 8 PM: hang out with W- and A+
  • 9 PM: A+'s bedtime routine
  • 10 PM: call my mom, read

Context: A+ is 9 and in virtual grade 3. W- is retired.

https://sachachua.com/2025-04-10-01

Feel free to use this under the Creative Commons Attribution License.

I came across Hourly Comic Day1 in anhvn's weeknotes. I've been meaning to make some kind of timeline, even if it doesn't feel as insightful or humorous as other people's comics. That's a skill, I can develop it. Besides, capturing bits and pieces of my life now is likely to be something I'm glad for later on.

Some things I notice:

I'm A+'s default parent, so she comes to me for snuggles during recess and lunch, and she wants to spend time with me when she's bored. She's 9, as I keep reminding myself, so this is a time-limited offer. It's amazing. At the moment, she often chooses to hug me instead of read books or play Minecraft, or chooses to play Minecraft with me instead of by herself. Inevitably, the day will come when she'll switch to just grunting at me from time to time and then disappear into her room for hours on end. This is the time to snuggle and hang out.

I have maybe an hour of reliable focus time right after lunch. I could have more, but I like setting aside some time for playing the piano and for walking.

conscientiousness-piano.jpg

Playing the piano is an exercise in humility. I can't quite get my fingers to do what I want them to do, and my brain picks up phrases more slowly than I'd like.2 But it's also enjoyable to hear myself learn, so I continue.

Walking is good for me. It's important to keep moving. Biking gets me farther, but I have to pay more attention. Walking helps me have extra thinking time. I take a lapel mic along so that I can use the time to talk to myself. I notice I'm not the only one talking to myself in the park. I also like how I see other people out there with books, or with cameras, or with their lunches, or simply sitting on a bench and enjoying the sun. It's reassuring to see other people enjoying a slower pace.

I usually run out of thoughts to think before I run out of trails to walk. It's interesting. Sometimes I wonder how I might tinker with that. I have plenty of source material to think about from books and life experiences, but maybe I can dig into things further. Or maybe lowering the threshold with stream-of-consciousness dictation will help me bring more of my monkey mind out into the light. It's also okay to enjoy the quiet. Running into the limits of my thoughts makes it easier to use my computer time for tasks or coding instead of staring at a blank text file. When I do find myself drawn to a topic, then the braindumping gives me a head start on figuring out the parts of it that I care about.

I'm here because I choose to be. I could theoretically have a two-hour chunk in the evenings if I really wanted to, but then A+ tends to just watch videos. Sometimes if she's in a video-watching mood, I'll squeeze in some writing or some code, but it's not reliable and she might stop at any time, so I don't like to get into anything too deep.

I haven't been doing much consulting lately, since that's hard to do in small bursts. There are a couple of front-end Javascript requests on my list, but it's a little challenging for me to get into front-end tinkering because I have to load a fair bit of context into my brain when I'm trying to work around the vendor's way of doing things. I'll probably let them know I can't get around to those requests for now. Maybe someday.

I miss being in flow,3 but since that can often result in my experience A+'s desires for connection as an interruption (the Ovsiankina effect4 doesn't help), that's not a good fit for right now. Instead, I'll accept that this is the time for (mostly) fragmentary chaos, but I can still occasionally squeeze in 15 minutes here and there.5 The lack of focused time used to make me a little frustrated and antsy, but I think it's becoming a little easier as A+ becomes more independent. I can both see the light at the end of the tunnel and know that our paths will diverge.

I could have oodles of focused time during the day if A+ were to go to in-person school, but fortunately, I know from my experiment with semi-retirement that I probably won't actually end up writing a book or changing the world even if I have more focused time. Virtual school continues to be a reasonable fit for us.

Since I know I've only got about an hour of focused time a day, I can try to choose things carefully. It's surprisingly freeing, knowing that I'm not going to get to everything.6 I tend to:

  • Code little things for myself, because it's fun and it can make things marginally easier. I like tinkering with Emacs, although sometimes I also write Javascript or Python to automate things.
  • Writing and drawing, because then I can understand and remember things a little better
  • Working on important tasks, like doing our taxes

And then the odds and ends of time can be used for:

  • More writing: usually on my laptop, but sometimes on my phone too. It helps to keep my laptop on the main floor instead of leaving it upstairs.
  • Reading books and blog posts, especially when I can highlight and capture snippets. The iPad has come in handy for this.
  • Coding, but only things that I can put down easily
  • Tidying: always good to stay on top of things

E-mail tends to fall to the bottom of my list, especially e-mails that require thought and consideration. Even reviewing my inbox tends to be lower-priority, unless there's something I remember and want to work on.

April 2025_16.jpeg

So this is my life at the moment. This is already a big step up from before. Since A+ handles virtual school a little more independently now, I can mostly count on a bit of focused time, instead of living my days in interruption limbo.

It's pretty easy-going. It feels a little like we're making this breakwater around a bay, so that A+ can learn the ropes in a reasonably calm environment instead of being buffeted around by the stormy waves outside, and then she can sail out when she's ready. As lives go, this is all right.

Seasons come and seasons go. I'm glad my day gets to look like this. Even if it might seem pretty humdrum, I want to remember it, because there'll be a time when I'll miss us.

Footnotes

1

Hourly comics:

2

Brain speed: I vaguely remember being praised for being able to think quickly when I was younger. I think age, parental rewiring, and periods of sleep deprivation (also due to parenting) have thoroughly scrambled that part of my brain. That's okay. This is life. Gotta work with what I've got.

3

Missing being in flow: gosh, there used to be a time when I felt like I needed to rein in long programming sessions

5

Related: Meditations for Mortals (Oliver Burkeman, 2024):

  • Day Thirteen: Three hours: On finding focus in the chaos
    • Yup, definitely can't find three hours.
  • Day Twenty-one: What’s an interruption, anyway?: On the importance of staying distractible
    • My natural state isn't that of focused attention anyhow.
  • Day Twenty-eight: What matters: On finding your way

    Instead, you get to pour yourself into tasks that matter for no other reason than that nothing could be more enlivening, or more true to the situation in which you find yourself.

    I don't have to do anything that makes a big difference for humankind. I can just do the next little thing.

  • Day Two: Kayaks and superyachts: On actually doing things
    • Perhaps I can do one thing today, and that's okay.
6

Also from Meditations for Mortals (Oliver Burkeman, 2024): "Day One: It’s worse than you think: On the liberation of defeat"

But this is where things get interesting, because an important psychological shift occurs whenever you realise that a struggle you’d been approaching as if it were very difficult is actually completely impossible.

View org source for this post

Cases of mangoes, coolers of freezies

| parenting, life

Assumed audience:

  • Future me, when mango freezies are a distant memory
  • Maybe other parents who might consider splurging on fruits
2025-04-08-cases-of-mangoes.jpg

We have two cases of mangoes on our kitchen counter: the last case of Ataulfo mangoes W- could find at the Nations supermarket a short bike-ride away from the house (slightly underripe at purchase; it's been a few days, so now A+ says they're perfect), and a case of Tommy Atkins mangoes that are greener and tougher. He had meant to buy Hadens, but accidentally picked the Tommys up instead. That's okay, I said. I can turn them into mango shakes.

Wikipedia describes the Tommys as:

Although generally not considered to be the best in terms of sweetness and flavor, it is valued for its very long shelf life and tolerance of handling and transportation with little or no bruising or degradation.

Thomas Atkins submitted the fruit to the variety committee of the Florida Mango Forum multiple times during the 1950s, which rejected it due to its unremarkable eating qualities and considerable fiber in the flesh.

2025-04-08-mango-turtle.jpg

A+ has definitely developed mango preferences. Like me, she likes the smooth, sweet creaminess of Ataulfo and other Philippine-type mangoes. She's the one who regularly checks the mangoes for ripeness and reports on their status, letting us know as soon as they're soft. After a good meal, she often prepares a mango for herself, using a paring knife to skim it close to the seed. Sometimes she cuts a criss-cross grid and flips it into a turtle, or scoops out the insides for chopstick practice. She's gotten much better at getting most of the mango out; there's usually very little for me to scrape off the rest of the skins. Without prompting, she remembers to wash her hands before and after. One evening, watching her deftly cut her mango, I said, "People pay good money to send kids to cooking classes so they can pick up knife skills. Could buy a lot of mangoes for that money." We had fun joking about the short-term and long-term benefits.

I grew up eating mangoes in the Philippines. Sometimes they were on the breakfast table. Sometimes I had them at merienda (afternoon snack). Mangoes were either yellow, kidney-shaped, soft, and sweet, or the tart green mangoes that were also delicious in a different way, either straight-up or with salt or with bagoong (fermented fish or shrimp paste). (It took me a while to appreciate bagoong, but eventually I got the hang of it.) Green mango shakes were also a treat.

2025-04-08-mango-treats.jpg

After I moved to Canada in 2005, I went a long time without regularly buying mangoes. Still mentally converting costs to Philippine pesos, I balked at the expense of individual mangoes. The supermarket rarely sold good-looking Ataulfo mangoes, mostly just other mango cultivars that were more fibrous. If they did have the yellow kidney-shaped mangoes of my memory, the ones sold individually tended to be wrinkly and sad. A case of mangoes felt like overkill for just me, and I never quite got around to seeing if any of my friends wanted to, I don't know, rotate mango buying.

I think we only started buying cases of mangoes last year or the year before that. Now we're more comfortable knowing that even if we buy cases one after the other, we'll eat them before they go bad. We'll never say, "I'm all mangoed out." (And if we ever do get to that point, I can just dehydrate whichever mangoes are left.) It is definitely a frill and we're lucky to be able to enjoy them.

2025-04-08-blender.jpg

When it's warm enough for the kids to complain of the heat, we tend to ramp up our mango consumption even more. For the past two years, I've been bringing a cooler of frozen treats to A+'s park playdates. It started as a way to fend off temptation from the ice cream trucks that like to prowl around parks, and as a reaction to the ridiculousness of retail/wholesale pricing when it comes to summer refreshments. My days in A+'s sphere of friends are numbered, so I may as well make the most of it. It's a splurge, but time-limited. She will probably not invite me to lurk in the background with a cooler of popsicles when she's 18 years old. So yes to all the things, for now: home-made mango freezies; strawberries and peaches from the farmers market when they're in season; freezies made from pick-your-own strawberries when we make it out to a farm. (Child labour!) Raspberry freezies are sometimes too intense or too seedy for the kids. A+ is not a fan of cantaloupe freezies, but I like them. For the watermelon freezes, we're a bit divided. I like to add a little bit of sugar to the watermelon if it seems like it needs it. A+ takes pride in not adding any sugar to home-made freezies, so whenever she wants to be in charge of making them (which is almost always), I let her go with whatever she wants. She likes to use the mini-watermelons and add a splash of lemon juice. It always tastes refreshing.

Sometimes we bring Chapman's ice lollies (the kids prefer the single-flavour ones) or other store-bought treats. Sometimes A+ proudly insists on paying for these herself; early experiences of prosocial spending, hooray! When the fruits are in season, I prefer to make home-made freezies. We don't follow any recipes. We just prepare the fruits and put them into the blender.

2025-04-08-popsicle-bag.jpg

I use disposable popsicle bags from AliExpress since I haven't found a local source I like, and have determined that:

  • Zipper seals are nice for filling, but difficult to open. The best bags have a little notch for tearing under the seal, but this is hard to see in product photos. I often bring scissors if the bags don't have notches.
  • 22cm x 5cm: just right
  • 28cm x 5.5cm: too much

We have a couple of reusable freezie molds that we sometimes use. I save those for A+ and me because I know they'll find their way back to the cooler.

I used to walk to the playdates with A+ in a stroller (she still fits in the Thule Chariot Cheetah XT, even at 9 years old), with the cooler balanced on top of it. It took me 45 minutes to an hour to walk to her usual park playdates, but the freezies were fine if I packed the cooler with lots of ice packs. With the cargo bike, I can get to the playdates in 15 minutes or so, which means there's plenty of time for A+ to play and get warm before she decides it's time for a freezie break, and the freezies are all still nicely cold.

2025-04-08-friends.jpg

A+'s favourite friends get first dibs by virtue of proximity when she decides it's popsicle time (after A+, of course, who gets first pick). It feels quite satisfying when A+'s friends sidle up and ask very politely if there happen to be any more of those mango popsicles. Then we extend the selection to everyone else in the playgroup, and then, when everyone's sorted out, the occasional brave soul who wanders up to the strange woman handing frozen treats out to kids. I try to make eye contact with their grown-up first to check if it's okay. Sometimes when I'm distracted, I ask the new kids if their grown-up is okay with it, but I get the feeling that their quick nod might not be entirely reliable as it tends to be done with their eyes fixed on the prize. Gotta find their actual grown-up. I know A+ likes to go back for seconds or thirds on really hot days, so sometimes I keep a special stash for her in a nylon drawstring bag in the cooler. Sometimes I have one too.

2025-04-08-mango-heart.jpg

I'm Filipino. Part of my love language is food. Taste can anchor memories, and I hope these are part of her core experiences of childhood. I want these to be part of my memories of her. That's worth the mangoes.

View org source for this post

Feline feelings

| drawing, cat

Feel free to use this under the Creative Commons Attribution License.

Text from sketch

Feline feelings sachachua.com/2025-03-26-01

  • happy
    • playful
    • content
    • interested
    • proud
    • accepted
    • powerful
    • peaceful
    • trusting
    • optimistic
  • surprised
    • startled
    • confused
    • amazed
    • excited
  • bad
    • tired
    • busy
    • stressed
    • bored
  • fearful
    • scared
    • anxious
    • weak
    • rejected
    • insecure
    • threatened
  • angry
    • let down
    • humiliated
    • bitter
    • mad
    • aggressive
    • frustrated
    • distant
    • critical
  • disgusted
    • disapproving
    • disappointed
    • awful
    • repelled
  • sad
    • lonely
    • vulnerable
    • despair
    • guilty
    • depressed
    • hurt

Feelings wheel by Geoffrey Roberts

I want to draw more expressively, and experimenting with distinguishing between emotions seems like a good start. I followed up on our idea of drawing cats after Stick figure out feelings. It was a lot of fun drawing various kitties based on Geoffrey Roberts' emotion wheel. It turns out I'm still sometimes iffy on what a cat looks like in different poses, but maybe enough of the cat-ness has come through in these little doodles. =)

Related posts:

You might also like:

View org source for this post

Reflecting on my conscientiousness (or whatever the opposite is)

| reflection, life

Over the past few days, I've been reflecting on the personality trait of conscientiousness, which is something that can be a bit of a struggle for me. From Wikipedia:

Conscientiousness is the personality trait of being responsible, careful, or diligent. Conscientiousness implies a desire to do a task well, and to take obligations to others seriously. Conscientious people tend to be efficient and organized as opposed to easy-going and disorderly. They tend to show self-discipline, act dutifully, and aim for achievement; they display planned rather than spontaneous behavior; and they are generally dependable. Conscientiousness manifests in characteristic behaviors such as being neat, systematic, careful, thorough, and deliberate (tending to think carefully before acting).

Conscientiousness and me

conscientiousness-butterfly.jpg

I think of myself as not very conscientious. At school, I struggled with completing homework, sometimes not even turning in assigned essays. I forgot about deadlines and accidentally left my stuff behind. I did well on standardized tests because I could read quickly and eliminate probably incorrect answers, but other types of tests were a drag. There were some subjects I liked enough to do well in (well, mostly teachers I found engaging). For the most part, though, I didn't particularly care about grades. Even as an adult, I occasionally forget to finish something I'm working on, I lose things and time due to disorganization and attentional hiccups, and I've used my "Oops" fund a number of times. (W+ is more conscientious than I am, and occasionally patiently reminds me to take care of stuff.) I tend to follow the butterflies of my interest.

Fortunately, I've figured out some things that work well for me. Coding is great because even though it needs me to be pretty exact, I can work in small chunks, write tests to help me double-check, and automate repetitive tasks that my brain tends to hiccup on. When I worked at IBM, I had a lot of fun working on projects I cared about, like building systems to help professionals transition into teaching or helping food banks distribute food. I also did well skimming pages and pages of internal discussions so that I could summarize key themes for workshops. For my consulting clients, I tend to focus on prototyping their crazy ideas. If the idea proves worthwhile, we can then turn it over to other people to get it ready for production. Org Mode helps me keep track of what I want to do and when. In the Emacs community, I tend to focus on breadth rather than depth: Emacs News instead of package maintenance or core Emacs development. (And besides, it's volunteering anyhow, so when people bump into bugs in my code, it's either an opportunity for them to help out or something they might just put up with or work around.) I like experimenting, and I don't feel stuck; I can move on from an experiment when I've gotten enough data or when things change. I've shifted my life so that most of the tasks on my to-do list are things that I want to do that aren't time-sensitive, so I can do them when I want.

Noticing when my brain likes to do the work

conscientiousness-piano.jpg

I recognize myself in other descriptions of conscientiousness. I like to plan and I like to take notes. I get somewhat stressed by the idea of being late, although I've learned to chill out a little about that because kids mean being flexible about time. I like considering decisions carefully and doing little experiments. I find risky behaviour stressful rather than fun. Still, I tend to think of myself as someone who doesn't do the extra work, who often doesn't pay attention to the fiddly details. A few counter-examples might help me figure out more about when my brain likes to spend the extra time on things:

  • In a cryptography course that I took in university, we had an assignment to break a simple monalphabetic cipher. Each student was assigned one line. I had fun crunching through all of them (puzzles! piece of cake) and I distinctly remember relishing the teachers' surprise the next day.
  • I signed up for more school, getting a master's degree in Mechanical and Industrial Engineering at the University of Toronto. I got interested in it for two reasons:
    • I enjoyed teaching computer science at my alma mater. Getting an advanced degree was strongly recommended. I experimented with a masters in education but I wasn't that interested in it.
    • I was also interested in personal information management thanks to Emacs and Planner Mode, so I was curious about exploring the usage patterns of people who had highly customized their PIM tool. Several papers in that area had been written by a researcher at the University of Toronto, so I applied there for a master's. That researcher left shortly after I arrived, so we looked around for another topic. Eventually we settled on social networking platforms in organizations, which was also interesting for me because it was about how people use technology to organize collective knowledge.
  • I also signed up for parenting knowing that it's a ton of extra work including stress-testing my abilities, being responsible for helping an entirely separate little being figure out things I'm still figuring out myself, and handling endless problem-solving and adaptation in the face of uncertainty.
  • I notice that I'm getting a little better at slowing down and practising piano, singing, and drawing. I've tried all these things before, but now I can approach it differently because I'm going into it with more life experience.
    • For piano, I can treat it like a moving meditation on the quirks of my monkey mind, and be amused at how my brain learns. I enjoy feeling the motions become more automatic. I also like the thoughts and memories that the pieces evoke. (As part of this beginner course I'm doing, I just practised a very simple version of "Thus Spake Zarathustra", which makes everything feel more epic.) Eventually I think it would be nice to be able to play the music that A+ and I might want to sing to. It seems to be my current hyperfocus. I enjoy spending the time practising, knowing that there's no way to skip that part (and perhaps this is even supposed to be the fun part).
    • For singing, I can be mystified by all the weird movements that I have to figure out in my larynx and my diaphragm and other parts I haven't even figured out how to name yet, much less activate. It gives me some empathy for how kids are learning about things we can't easily teach them.
    • For drawing, I can be amused by the gap between how things really are and how I imagine them to be, and the gap between what I imagine and what I can draw. The video tutorial assures me that taking the time to slow down and shade or add texture is worthwhile, and is even the fun part of drawing. I still get impatient occasionally (do I really want to spend all this time on one sketch?), but it's an interesting perspective. I think it might be nice to develop art into a relaxing activity. If I go through the steps, I'll probably get there. Also, I like doodling to break up the wall of text in a blog post like this one, so that's another fun way to practice.

So maybe I can be a bit more conscientious when it's something I'm curious about or care about.

Supporting my brain

conscientiousness-toolbox.jpg

For the tasks that I need to be conscientious about, there are other things that help:

  • I'm getting better at accepting my limits. For example, when I had a pie in the oven last night, I told A+ that I couldn't go off to play Minecraft with her because I might forget about the pie and accidentally undercook or overcook it.
  • Writing notes helps me keep track of where I am, what I wanted to do next, what I'm figuring out along the way, and so on. The possibility of sharing those notes (and thus having more opportunities to learn from my past self or from other people) also encourages me to get to a point where those notes can be shared. Here I really appreciate how Org Mode helps me capture, manage, and post my tasks and notes, thanks to literate programming. People occasionally tell me that they think I'm very organized, but that's probably just because I write about stuff so that when I forget, I can look them up again.
  • Checklists are also handy. Most of the time, I just make a checklist on my phone using Orgzly Revived, but maybe I can make these more visual. I notice that I'm not particularly influenced by the gamification strategy of a streak count and mildly influenced by XP bars.
  • Journal entries and blog posts also give me a record of what I've worked on, and even little bits of progress accumulate.
  • I'm also learning to to distract the fidgety part of my brain with music or movement, and to manage it with timers. Timers are great. Timers to get started, timers to check in with myself, timers to come back…
  • Automation is wonderful. Getting a computer to do the work is often more fun and less error-prone than my doing it myself. Even semi-automation is helpful.

Despite not thinking of myself as particularly conscientious, I'm pretty happy with what I've been figuring out about my life and the world. I can think of how I work as building on my strengths instead of just working around my weaknesses. I enjoy learning about and dabbling in lots of different interests, and the combination of ideas can be very useful (like dancer curiosity). Framing many decisions as experiments helps me get to 80%-fine quickly, and I don't spend a lot of time chasing down that last 20% that takes most of the effort. I don't fit the hustle culture of many self-help books, blogs, and videos, and that's okay.

Not far from the tree

conscientiousness-ultralight.jpg

I think my dad was not particulary conscientious either, at least not in terms of planning ahead, paying attention to details, following conventions. He was always in motion, happiest whenever he had a crazy project. Fortunately, he was really good at inspiring other people to handle the logistics. He came up with the ideas ("I want to fly across the Philippines in an ultralight") and people like my mom figured out how (fuel, landing spots, etc.). His spontaneous road trips drove me a little batty when I was a kid. But also, when it came to the things he cared about, he could spend hours, days, weeks on getting it right. I remember how he'd stay up late to figure something out, whether it was digital photography or Microsoft 3D Pinball. I've written about how he repeatedly drew variations on the same sketch in order to figure out what he wanted. He did okay. He found his way, even though it looked nothing at all like the standard paths. I'm probably doing all right, too.

My mom was more conscientious and deliberate than my dad was. She handled the business while my dad got to focus on his passions. From her, I picked up the habits of reading and writing. I think I'd like to be more of a mix between their styles rather than one or the other.

Growing

Apparently, conscientiousness tends to increase with age, so that's interesting. I feel slower when it comes to some things (probably because of adapting to all those distractions and periods of sleep deprivation, or maybe age, or simply a more realistic evaluation of my abilities), so it's easier to give myself time to do things that are slow. Maybe I'll get better at enjoying the act of practising and paying attention to the details. I'll probably benefit from more orderliness, too. I wonder how I can get my brain to enjoy decluttering and figuring out the right homes for objects. It's a little like preparing the space so that I can see what I like and it's easy to work on what I enjoy. (Marie Kondo's The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up might be relevant here, although even she has found keeping a tidy house with kids to be a challenge…)

Tangent: A quote from Marie Kondo

When I first became a mother, I felt frustrated when I couldn’t tidy my home exactly the way I wanted. Then, I had two more children, and I found I didn’t even have the energy to consider some of my former practices around the house!

With this in mind, here are some tips that help me keep my home in order with two young children.

Motherhood has taught me to be more forgiving of myself. The joy that comes from parenting exceeds any satisfaction that could have come from a perfectly neat home. My children also remind me that our lives can shift daily (if not every minute) — and that the best we can do is honor where we are in the present moment.

source

I've been trying to think of a neutral or positively-coded word for the opposite of the conscientiousness personality trait. I asked Claude AI to generate a bunch of antonyms. I don't quite identify with "free-spirited" or "spontaneous", but I like "adaptable" and "improvisational," and "interest-driven" is an accurate description of the way we spend our energy. Those words don't quite cover the same cluster of meanings that "conscientious" does, but they give me other ways to think about the personality trait as something more positive.

Learning on my own and with others

I'm always curious about how I can work with what I've got. New challenges, new experiences, new capabilities… I get to learn even more about how my brain works and what I can do, especially as I build systems and processes to support myself.

Figuring out more about building on my strengths will also help me parent A+, so this work is extra worth it. I can even learn from the worries that sometimes flutter up when I see her also wandering far from what the school system would probably prefer that she focus on.

conscientiousness-timeline.jpg

Thinking about processes and tools and self-acceptance also makes me think a little about Andy's recent blog post My 10 Years with Emacs, in which (among other thoughts about what he's learned about using Emacs and other people he wants to thank for helping) he mentions thinking of me as kind of the community mom. I was 18 when I started using Emacs, I've grown up in this community, and I've got blog posts and videos that help me catch glimpses of myself throughout the years. It does feel interesting to notice the shifts in my brain, from kind of an enthusiastic puppy bursting with energy to something more about experimentation, reflection, and connection. If I can get better at understanding myself and the tools I can build to support who I am and what I want to do, I wonder if that'll help other people too. I'm looking forward to being able to someday bring grandparent energy to this. What could that be like? There are people even older than I am in this community, which is wonderful. I'm looking forward to seeing how we all figure out how to work with what we've got.

View org source for this post

A year with my cargo bike

| decision, life

Summary: Life with a cargo bike has been working out really well for our family.

Stroller

I used to walk for an hour to get to some of A+'s playdates, pushing her in the Thule bike trailer / stroller that she still fit into. I liked bringing popsicles during the summer so that A+ could share them with her friends, so I often balanced a small cooler on top of the stroller and walked as briskly as I could. The popsicles were usually still reasonably cold by the time I got to the park. We'd spend a few hours playing there, and then there would be another hour's walk back. A+ usually napped on the way, so it was a chance for me to listen to podcasts.

Car

Sometimes we biked to the playdate instead. That was much faster in terms of getting there, even with a popsicle break halfway through. Those popsicles were only for us, since I couldn't bring a cooler on my bike. Also, A+ was usually too tired to bike back, or it was too dark for her to be safe biking on the busy streets between the park and our house, so we often waited in the mall parking lot for W- to pick up A+ and her bike in his car. Then I biked back by myself.

Dumped

We'd been considering cargo bikes for a while, and eventually things lined up to make it possible. It was a carefully-considered decision. I did a bunch of test rides using different models of cargo bikes. My height (or lack of it) ruled out many of the models designed for taller people. A+ was quite vocal about her preference for the suspension on the R&M Load cargo bikes, and she liked the view from the front-loaders more than the longtails. I rented the Load 75 and the Load 60 to try them out, accidentally tipping over onto the side an embarrassing number of times; A+ was safely buckled in but very grumpy about it.

When we confirmed that a cargo bike fit into our life, I bought a Riese & Müller Load 75 from Curbside Cycle. We picked the Load 75 over the Load 60 because the rain cover was nicer and the extra room could give us more years of use as A+ grows.

Loaded up

I love it. Biking is my favourite way to get around. There's just something so cheerful about it. A+ and I sing as we go around town. We smile at dogs in sweaters. She takes pictures of trees. Sometimes there are cargo bikes in front of us as we wait at the traffic light, and we wave and nod.

We got the Bakkie bag, too. It's designed to tow a kid's bike. That way, A+ can bike wherever she wants. When she gets tired, she can hop into the cargo bike and I can buckle her bike into the Bakkie bag, towing it all the way home. We've been able to go on more bike adventures by ourselves and together with W- because we don't have to worry about exceeding A+'s range.

Hot chocolate

Since we could get to the playground in 15 minutes instead of 60, it was a lot easier to bring snacks to share. We pretty much kept the playground kids well-supplied with free popsicles (and the occasional much-coveted ice cream treat) all summer, and the ice packs came in handy for treating the occasional bumps too. We even brought disposable cups and insulated bottles of hot water for making hot chocolate and instant apple cider in the colder months.

Potting mix

Aside from taking A+ to a wider range of places, we've also used it to bring several bags of potting mix or a propane tank home from the hardware store, carry other bulky items, and take lots of stuff to the community environment days for recycling/donation.

We are very lucky to have cargo biking as an option. When people ask me how much it is, I ruefully tell them, "Well, it's less than a second car." We weren't actually choosing between this and a second car; even though W- rarely uses his car these days, I'm too anxious to drive. My brain gets a little squirrelly and is prone to attentional hiccups. I don't want a moment of distraction to result in someone's death or serious injury. I'm still on alert when I bike, but it feels a lot more like something I can handle. And biking is so fast and convenient. I don't have to nudge A+ out of a playdate so that we can make it out before the subway gets packed like sardines, or shepherd A+ back home from the subway station ("I'm tiiiired.").

I got the bike in November 2023. Here's how much I biked over the past year:

Month KM
Nov 208
Dec 157
Jan 69
Feb 78
Mar 176
Apr 82
May 106
Jun 143
Jul 135
Aug 96
Sep 212
Oct 120
2024-11-04T14:04:00.159647 image/svg+xml Matplotlib v3.6.3, https://matplotlib.org/
Figure 1: Graph of kilometres by month

I was pleasantly surprised that even during the cold months (and A+'s reluctance to go outside if it was very cold or slushy), and even during the schoolweek, we still managed to get out on the bike.

2024-11-04T13:43:31.432403 image/svg+xml Matplotlib v3.6.3, https://matplotlib.org/
Figure 2: Kilometres by date

I got data from the ebike-connect site using Spookfox using the code below.

Javascript code for extracting distances and times
[...document.querySelectorAll('.activities__ride-menu')].map((o) => {
  return {
    date: o.querySelector('.activities__menu-details > span').textContent,
    distance: o.querySelector('.activities__menu-distance-text').textContent.trim(),
    time: o.querySelector('.activities__menu-details > span:nth-child(2) > span:nth-child(2)').textContent,
  }
});
Emacs Lisp to group distance by month
(let ((by-month (seq-group-by
  (lambda (row)
    (let ((date (plist-get row :date)))
      (when (string-match "[0-9][0-9]\\.\\([0-9][0-9]\\)\\.\\([0-9][0-9]\\) [0-9][0-9]:[0-9][0-9]"
                          date)
        (format "20%s-%s-01"
                (match-string 2 date)
                (match-string 1 date)))))
  trips)))
  (append
   '(("Month" "Distance")
     hline)
   (mapcar
    (lambda (row)
      (list (format-time-string "%b" (date-to-time (car row)))
            (format
             "%d"
             (round (apply '+
                           (mapcar (lambda (entry) (string-to-number (plist-get entry :distance)))
                                   (cdr row)))))))
    (reverse (seq-filter (lambda (o) (string< (car o) "2024-11")) by-month)))))
Emacs Lisp to group distance by date
(let ((by-day (seq-group-by
  (lambda (row)
    (let ((date (plist-get row :date)))
      (when (string-match "\\([0-9][0-9]\\)\\.\\([0-9][0-9]\\)\\.\\([0-9][0-9]\\) [0-9][0-9]:[0-9][0-9]"
                          date)
        (format "20%s-%s-%s"
                (match-string 3 date)
                (match-string 2 date)
                (match-string 1 date)))))
  trips)))
  (json-encode (mapcar
   (lambda (row)
     (cons (car row)
           (format
            "%d"
            (round (apply '+
                          (mapcar (lambda (entry) (string-to-number (plist-get entry :distance)))
                                  (cdr row)))))))
   (reverse (seq-filter (lambda (o) (string< (car o) "2024-11")) by-day)))))
Python code for making a bar graph of distance by month
import pandas as pd
import datetime
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import seaborn as sns
import json

data = trips
df = pd.DataFrame(data, columns=["Month", "Distance"])
df.set_index('Month')
df['Distance'] = df['Distance'].astype(float)
plt.figure(figsize=(8, 6), dpi=100)
sns.barplot(data=df, y='Distance', x='Month')
plt.savefig('biking-distance-by-month.svg')
Python code for making a heatmap
import pandas as pd
import datetime
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import seaborn as sns
import json

start_date = datetime.datetime(2023, 11, 1)
end_date = datetime.datetime(2024, 11, 1)
dates = pd.date_range(start=start_date, end=end_date, freq='D')
data = json.loads(trips)
df = pd.DataFrame.from_dict(data, orient='index')
df.index = pd.to_datetime(df.index)
df[0] = df[0].astype(float)
# Create calendar heatmap
plt.figure(figsize=(16, 3), dpi=100)
pivoted = df.pivot_table(index=df.index.day_name(), columns=df.index.strftime('%Y-%W'))
all_days = ['Monday', 'Tuesday', 'Wednesday', 'Thursday', 'Friday', 'Saturday', 'Sunday']
pivoted.index = pd.Categorical(pivoted.index, all_days, ordered=True)
pivoted = pivoted.sort_index()
heatmap = sns.heatmap(
    pivoted,
    cmap="crest",
    linewidths=0.5,
    linecolor='white'
)

# Set the x-axis tick labels to show only the months
month_labels = df.index.strftime('%b').unique()
month_ticks = [i * 4 for i in range(len(month_labels))]
plt.xticks(
    month_ticks,
    month_labels,
    rotation=90
)
tick_positions = [i + 0.5 for i in range(len(all_days))]
plt.yticks(tick_positions, all_days)
plt.title('Distance on dates')
plt.xlabel('November 2023 - November 2024')
plt.ylabel('')
plt.xticks(rotation=90)
plt.savefig('biking-by-day.svg')

I like our cargo bike a lot. I hope to ride it for many years to come.

View org source for this post

Tiny chunks

| productivity, life

I want to get better at working in tiny chunks. Some of the things I find hard are:

  • getting incomplete thoughts out of my head when the kiddo interrupts so that I don't get grumpy (because of the Ovsiankina effect)
  • managing the stack of interrupting tasks and yak-shaving temptations
  • still making time for larger projects or things with less-immediate or more uncertain payoffs

Some general ways to improve:

  • Reduce friction so that more things can fit in less time.
    • Take notes
    • Improve workflows and tools
    • Create templates
  • Build momentum: focusing several chunks on one project to minimize context switches and make more progress
  • Lower expectations and split things up.
  • Start with a rough cut and then refine.
  • Use different types of work:
    • Organizing information can be easier than thinking up something new
    • Recognizing things from a list can be easier than recalling them from scratch

How can I get better at using tiny chunks in different aspects of my life?

  • Code:
    • Now that I'm on a more powerful computer, I'm looking forward to learning how to take advantage of LSP, completion, and other modern conveniences.
    • I can replace social media doomscrolling with reading APIs, guides, and code samples.
    • I can take more notes and review them.
  • Writing:
    • If I sketch my thoughts, that can help me think through things in a more nonlinear way at the beginning. Mindmaps and sketchnotes might actually be easier than using text outlines, since I can do them off my computer.
    • Dictation might help me turn other pockets of time into writing time, and then turn computer time into editing time.
    • Improving my workflows makes it easier for me to get the text out into a blog post that has a sketch or a video or a screenshot.
  • Drawing:
    • I can ask smaller questions so that I can get to an answer faster. I also don't have to flesh out the full thought in the drawing - I can use dictation or writing to add more details.
    • I can crop the image to remove the pressure to use the full page. I used to draw my thoughts on index cards. That was a good size for a small thought, and they were easier to build up into larger chunks.
    • I can use visual organizers, metaphors, and other structures to help me think through things. That might also give me additional insights.
  • Bigger projects: One of the things that sometimes frustrates me is having bigger projects that I can't figure out how to fit into smaller segments, or that take a lot of setup time and therefore tend to get deprioritized in favor of things with more immediate payoffs.
    • I have a few 1.5-hour chunks of focused time because of A+'s virtual school, and I might be able to reserve more time eventually. It might be good to have that time when I'm not prioritizing short tasks and quick wins. Aside from that, if I get focused time in the evening, the trade-off is usually that A+ binge-watches YouTube videos when I'm not focusing on her. Sometimes I'm okay with this because I really want some thinking time. It's better when I'm getting that focused time because she's off doing something with W-, though.
    • I tend to work on whatever I've been thinking about lately (availability bias), but it might be good to review longer-term projects/interests to keep them on my radar or make peace with archiving them.
    • Even the stuff that feels like very slow progress can be worthwhile.
  • Life:
    • Sometimes I feel a little distracted by things I want to do, but it's worth figuring out how to put stuff aside so that I can play. Bluey has plenty of examples of short games that could be fun to play with A+.
    • There's always time to work on health. Sometimes doing a single pushup makes it easier to do another, especially when the kiddo jumps in and starts exercising too.
    • Similarly, a small chunk of time is great for tidying.
View org source for this post