Some people love shopping. That’s why “retail therapy” is a thing. Other people hate shopping, and try to do it as little as possible. It’s hard to find anything I like, even after I talk myself into being okay with buying things at full retail price, and even after adjusting my price range higher and higher.

I tried desensitizing myself by going out shopping without a particular goal in mind, just familiarizing myself with the colours and styles, and being open to buying something if it appealed to me. Several weekends of this turned up a few pairs of pants and T-shirts, but no epiphanies.

I started looking into alternatives. It seems wardrobe stylists work on commission, so you should plan to spend a good chunk of money – maybe $500 or $1000, which was more than I wanted to do at that moment. The custom dressmakers I asked quoted me rates around $250 for a single garment (although I didn’t ask if they’d reduce it for a super-simple pattern). Online tailors had very mixed reviews.

I figured it would be worth giving sewing a try. I didn’t need anything fancy, after all. I spent a few hours looking around for the simplest free pattern for a top, and I settled on the Colette Sorbetto pattern. I sewed a few, and then simplified the pattern further by removing the pleat. I sewed a few more. When I learned how to use the laser cutter, I used the laser to quickly and accurately cut even more pieces for sewing.

Let’s talk numbers.

The typical shirts I like cost between $40 and $120 at the store, but take hours and hours to shop for. It’s also a tiring and frustrating experience.

Broadcloth costs $2 a yard. Quilting fabric and cotton shirting tend to be around $12 to $14 a yard. The fanciest cotton I can get (in terms of fabric, not just design) seems to be Liberty cotton lawn, at $24 a yard. I wasn’t sure if it would be worth it, but it is nicely breathable, so maybe. I typically buy 1.5 yards per top, although this leaves me with lots of excess fabric. I could probably fit a top in 1 yard.

I’ve spent about $130 for the 16 tops I’ve made so far, or an average of $8 per top. I expect future tops to cost between $15 to $40, depending on fabric quality and whether the design is one-way.

The bulk of the cost is really time. Since I started in February, I’ve spent 105 hours sewing: picking out fabric, cutting, sewing, thinking about patterns and plans. This is an average of 7 hours per top, which feels a bit on the high side. I think most of it is indecisiveness about fabric. =) Prepping and cutting the fabric on the laser takes maybe 20 minutes total, and once that’s done, I can sew a top in about 2 hours.

You can analyze time trade-offs by assigning an arbitrary value to them. You might use minimum wage, or the replacement cost of hiring someone to take on some of your lower-value activities for you. For example, you might use $15/hour as a replacement cost, since that seems to be the going rate for a housekeeper in Toronto. If so, then my tops have cost an average of $110 or so. I expect future tops to use nicer fabric but require less time, so the estimated cost will likely be $75-100 per top.

Alternatively, you could use a higher rate – say, my consulting rate – since I could theoretically be working instead of sewing. But I don’t particularly feel like working more. If I did, there would be other activities I would cut back on first, like playing video games, or reading fiction.

Where did the time come from? It’s hard to say, since I was changing some of my other routines too. Anyway, I analyzed a weekly summary of my time records, correlating different categories with the time I tracked under sewing.

Category	Correlational coefficient
Business – Build – Learn	-0.94
Business – Build – Quantified Awesome	-0.92
Discretionary – Productive – Japanese	-0.82
Business – Build – Drawing	-0.64
Discretionary – Play – Read – Fiction	-0.61

I shifted away from learning, coding, and Japanese review, and I reduced my drawing and reading time. They’re all discretionary activities, so it’s not like I was working less or sleeping less in order to sew. (I actually worked a little more than I did before.)

I’ve come to think of sewing as fun, so I might consider the time as “free.” In fact, it might even have a positive effect. Making things myself helps me develop skills and enables imagination, so it’s like education. Cost-wise, it feels like spending on fabric and time is a definite win compared to, say, buying fast fashion tops that may or may not be ethically sourced.

What did I learn?

I learned that it takes surprisingly little time and money to develop a comfortable level of skill when repeating the same sewing pattern. I started sewing on Feb 11. On Feb 23, after about six hours total, I wore my first top. Here you can see DIY taking over the clothes I wear:

Week starting	Sat	Sun	Mon	Tue	Wed	Thu	Fri
Feb 7	x	x	x	x	x	x	x
Feb 14	x	x	x	x	x	x	x
Feb 21	x	x	mine	x	x	mine	x
Feb 28	x	x	x	mine	x	x	x
Mar 7	x	x	x	mine	mine	mine	mine
Mar 14	mine	x	mine	mine	mine	mine	mine
Mar 21	mine	mine	mine	mine	mine	mine	mine
Mar 28	x	mine	mine	mine	x	mine	mine
Apr 4	x	x	mine	mine	x	mine	mine
Apr 11	x	mine	mine	mine	mine	mine	mine
Apr 18	mine	mine	mine	mine	mine	mine	mine
Apr 25	mine	mine	mine	mine	mine	mine	mine
May 2	x	x	mine	mine	mine	mine	mine

I learned that I really enjoy the things you can’t buy with money. There’s this feeling of freedom that comes with knowing that I don’t have to rely on manufacturers and retailers to make things I like. I might even be able to come up with things that I wouldn’t be able to find in stores. If things wear out, I can repair or replace them.

I have two more tops on the go, so that should bring me to a total of eleven cotton/polyester tops and seven 100% cotton ones. I think I’ll hold off on sewing more tops after that. Maybe I’ll sew containers and bags to use up my scraps, and then I’ll think about sewing other things I wear. I’m not interested in sewing things for anyone else (aside from family, maybe), so don’t bother asking me. <laugh>

Anyway, it was a pleasant surprise to find out that it was easy to reduce the high-stress, low-value activity of shopping with something I enjoy much more. =)

At a recent Quantified Self Toronto meetup, one of the participants shared his key values (freedom, health, happiness, purpose) and asked for ideas on how to measure freedom. I gave him some quick tips on how I measured:

• Money:
  • Long-term freedom through a theoretical withdrawal rate: expenses vs net worth and investment returns
  • Short-term freedom for discretionary expenses: opportunity fund for tools and ideas, connection fund for treating people
• Time, particularly discretionary time (my own interests and projects)

In addition to those two easy metrics, there are a few other things that contribute to a feeling of freedom for me.

• How often do I have to wake up to an alarm clock, or can I sleep until I feel well-rested?
• Am I starting to be stressed because of commitments? Do I have to juggle or cut back?
• Can I follow the butterflies of my interest/energy, or have I promised to do a specific thing at a specific time?
• Can I share what I'm learning for free, or am I restricted by agreements or by need?
• Am I getting influenced by ads to want or buy things that I don't really need? Do I experience buyer's remorse, or do things contribute to clutter? Is it easy to remember my decisions or my values in the din?
• Do I have the space to enjoy a great relationship with W-?
• Can I make the things I want? Do I have the skills to create or modify things?
• Am I reacting or responding? How reflexive is my ability to see things in the light that I would like to see them in, and to respond the way I would like to respond?
• Can I learn about what I'm curious about? Do I use it in real life?
• Can I make small bets and learn from them?

I think it's because I tend to think of freedom as freedom from stress and freedom to do things – maybe more precisely, to live according to my choices without having to choose between deeply flawed options. I'm in a safe, rather privileged situation, so I'm not as worried about freedom to live or move or speak or learn; those are more important freedoms, for sure! So with the definition of freedom I have, I feel pretty free. Based on my impressions from conversations with other people, I think I'm probably in the top 10% of freedom in terms of people I know. Or at least a different sort of freedom; I'm more risk-averse than some of my friends are, for example, so they're freer in that sense.

If you break down the abstract concept of freedom into different types of freedom, you can figure out which types resonate with you and which ones don't. You might then be able to think of ways to measure the specific types of freedom you're curious about, and that will help you get a sense of areas in your life that you may want to tweak.

Philosophy has a lot to say about freedom, so that's another way to pick up ideas. The biggest freedom, for me – the one I most want to cultivate and keep – is the freedom that comes from choosing how I perceive the world and what I do in response. I like the freedom described in Epictetus' Discourses. How could I measure this or remind myself about this? Since it's entirely self-willed, I can keep track of whether I remember to take responsibility for my perceptions and responses and how easy it is to do so. I imagine that as I get better at it, I'll be more consistent at taking responsibility (even if I realize uncomfortable things about myself) and that I'll do it with more habit. I can also track the magnitude of things I respond to. I know that I can maintain my tranquility with small events, and I'll just have to wait and observe my behaviour with larger ones.

What does freedom mean to you? How do you observe or reflect on it?

“The question I really want to answer is: How can I live a fuller life, a happier life, a more productive life?” said someone in a recent e-mail about Quantified Self.

This made me think: The ideal life differs from person to person. What kind of awesome life am I moving towards? What motivates my choices and experiments, and how can I explore and learn more effectively?

I have role models for this, so I can imagine what it looks like. I can look at the differences between our lives to get a better understanding of the gaps and divergences.

My parents have full, happy, productive, and significant lives (although I think my mom thinks that what she’s doing isn’t as awesome or as significant as what my dad does). They make things happen. In particular, my dad touches lots of people’s lives. He has this really big scope.

W- lives a full, happy, productive life. I think he focuses on doing a good job at work, doing the right thing, knowing (and applying!) all sorts of good knowledge, and being a great husband and dad. We’re probably not going to get added to any tribal epics or history books, but that’s okay. I tend to think of his scope as smaller, more local, and he’s totally awesome within it. He sometimes reaches beyond that scope to support interesting things, like Kickstarters for well-designed products.

I think I live a decently full, happy, and productive life as well. Definitely yes to the happy bit; yay for high genetic set-points for happiness, good coping mechanisms, and a tremendous amount of luck. I keep some slack in my life, so I don’t feel like it’s super-full or super-productive. But people tell me that I do a lot, so maybe this is like the way my mom’s not as sure about her own contributions. I could probably do more, but this is as good a start as any.

My scope tends to be similar to W-‘s, focusing on our little world. But I also have these odd outgrowths for things like Emacs, visual thinking, social business, Hacklab… These aren’t as driven as my dad’s initiatives or my friends’ startups. They’re more… curiosity-based, maybe? I enjoy exploring those playgrounds and sharing what I’m learning. I think W- is like this too – he follows his curiosity into new areas.

So, if that helps me understand a little of who I am now, what does that tell me about the future Sacha I’m gradually inching towards, and what experiments can help me learn more?

I imagine Awesome Sacha to be this capable, curious person with lots of skills, including practical DIY stuff. Her equanimity and optimism lets her handle whatever life throws at her (and learn from it!). Maybe she’s more involved in the community now, helping her favourite causes, but probably more from a position of lifting people up rather than going on crusades. She takes plenty of notes and shares them, helping other people learn faster and see the connections among different ideas.

If that’s a potentially interesting Future Sacha I could become, what can I track to measure my progress along the way, and what kinds of experiments could stretch me a little bit more towards that?

• I can pick up and practise more skills: Cooking, sewing, electronics, DIY repair, etc. I can track this through journal entries, blog posts, comfort level, and decisions to do things myself versus asking or paying someone else to do things. For example, I now feel comfortable cooking, and I remember feeling a lot more uncertain about it before. I feel moderately okay about repairing small appliances and doing simple woodworking, but could use more practice. I have hardly any experience with plumbing or tiling.
• I can observe more, and write about more of what I’m learning: The little hiccups and challenges in my life feel so much smaller than the ones that other people go through, and I usually don’t write about them. Keeping a journal (even for the small stuff) might result in interesting reading later on, though. I already bounce back pretty quickly. It might be interesting to see how I respond to larger and larger changes, though, so deliberately taking on more commitments and more risks can help me develop this part of my life.
• I can help out more. I think it’s okay even if I don’t try to maximize utility on this for now. I’ll start with the things that resonate with me. It’s easy enough to track hours and money for this; maybe later I can add stories too.
• I can get better at taking, organizing, and sharing my notes. I can see the gap in my note-taking by noticing when I’m annoyed that I can’t find my old notes (either because I hadn’t written them up properly or I didn’t make them findable enough). As for organizing and sharing my notes, perhaps I can track the number of longer guides I put together, and whether I can get the hang of working with outlines and pipelines…

Most of my little experiments come from looking at ideas that are close by and saying, “Hmm, that’s interesting. Maybe I can explore that.” Sometimes it helps to look a little further ahead–to sketch out an ideal life, or even just a slightly-better-than-this life–and to plan little steps forward, going roughly in the right direction. Some ideals fit you better than others do, and some ideals just won’t resonate with you. For example, I currently don’t wish to be a highly-paid jetsetting public speaker. Thinking about this helps you figure out what kind of future you might want, and maybe figure out a few ways to try it on for size and track your progress as you grow into it.

What kind of person would Awesome You be like, and how can you inch a little closer?

Alan Lin asked:

One issue I have is prioritization. I sometimes find myself spending a lot of time on low-impact activities. How do you tackle this in your life? What's the most important thing you're working on right now?

It's easy to feel that most of your time is taken up with trivial things. There's taking care of yourself and the household. There are endless tasks to check off to-do lists. There's paperwork and overhead. Sometimes it feels like you're making very little progress.

Here are some things I've learned that help me with that feeling:

1. Understand and embrace your constraints.
2. Lay the groundwork for action by understanding yourself.
3. Act in tune with yourself.
4. Accumulate gradual progress.

1. UNDERSTAND AND EMBRACE YOUR CONSTRAINTS

Many productivity and time management books seem to have the mindset where your Real Work is what matters and the rest of your life is what gets in the way. Sometimes it feels like the goal is to be able to work a clear, focused 60-hour or 120-hour week, to squeeze out every last bit of productivity from every last moment.

For me, the unproductive time that I spend snuggling with W- or the cats – that's Real Life right there, for me, and I'm often all too aware of how short life is. The low-impact stuff is what grounds me and makes me human. As Richard Styrman points out in this comment, if other people can focus for longer, it's because the rest of their lives don't pull on them as much. I like the things that pull on me.

Instead of fighting your constraints, understand and embrace them. You can tweak them later, but when you make plans or evaluate yourself, do so with a realistic acceptance of the different things that pull on you. Know where you're starting from. Then you can review commitments, get rid of ones that you've been keeping by default, and reaffirm the ones that you do care about. You might even find creative ways to meet your commitments with less time or effort. In any case, knowing your constraints and connecting them to the commitments behind them will make it it easier to remember and appreciate the reason why you spend time on these things.

One of my favourite ways of understanding constraints is to actually track them. Let's look at time, for example. I know I spend a lot of my time on the general running of things. A quick summary from my time-tracking gives me this breakdown of the 744 hours in Oct 2014, a fairly typical month:

Hours	Activity
255.0	sleep
126.3	consulting, because it helps me make a difference and build skills
91.9	doing other business-related things
80.5	chores and other unpaid work
86.2	taking care of myself
38.3	playing, relaxing
30.4	family-related stuff
12.6	socializing
10.3	writing, because it helps me learn and connect with great people
7.4	working on Emacs, because it helps me learn and connect with great people
1.5	gardening
1.0	reading
0.5	tracking
1.7	woodworking

Assuming that my consulting, writing, and working on Emacs are the activities that have some impact on the wider world, that's 144 hours out of 744, or about 19% of all the time I have. This is roughly 4.5 hours a day. (And that's a generous assumption – many of the things I write are personal reflections of uncertain value to other people.)

Even with tons of control over my schedule, I also spend lots of time on low-impact activities. And this is okay. I'm fine with that. I don't need to turn into a value-creating machine entirely devoted to the pursuit of one clear goal. I don't think I even can. It works for other people, but not for me. I like the time I spend cooking and helping out around the house. I like the time I spend playing with interesting ideas. I like the pace I keep.

So I'm going to start with the assumption that this is the time that I can work with instead of being frustrated with the other things that fill my life.

An average of 4.5 hours a day is a lot, even if it's broken up into bits and pieces. It's enough time for me to write a deep reflection, sketch one or two books, work on some code… And day after day, if I add those hours up, that can become something interesting. Of course, it would probably add up to something more impressive if I picked one thing and focused on that. But I tend to enjoy a variety of interests, so I might as well work with that instead of against it, and sometimes the combinations can be fascinating.

Accepting your constraints doesn't mean being locked into them. You can still tweak things. For example, I experiment with time-saving techniques like bulk-cooking. But starting from the perspective of accepting your limits lets you plan more realistically and minimize frustration, which means you don't have to waste energy on beating yourself up for not being superhuman. Know what you can work with, and work with that.

You might consider tracking your time for a week to see where your time really goes. You can track your time with pen and paper, a spreadsheet, or freely-available tools for smartphones. The important part is to track your time as you use it instead of relying on memory or perception. Our minds lie to us about constraints, often exaggerating what we're dealing with. Collect data and find out.

2. LAY THE GROUNDWORK FOR ACTION BY UNDERSTANDING YOURSELF

When I review my constraints and commitments, I often ask myself: “Why did I commit to this? Why is this my choice?” This understanding helps me appreciate those constraints and come up with good ways to work within them.

My ideal is to almost always work on whatever I feel like working on. This sounds like a recipe for procrastination, an easy way for near-term pleasurable tasks to crowd out important but tedious ones. That's where preparing my mind can make a big difference. If I can prepare a list of good things to do that's in tune with my values, then I can easily choose from that list.

Here are some questions that help me prepare:

• Why do I feel like doing various things? Is there an underlying cause or unmet need that I can address? Am I avoiding something because I don't understand it or myself well enough? Do I only think that I want something, or do I really want it? I do a lot of this thinking and planning throughout my life, so that when those awesome hours come when everything's lined up and I'm ready to make something, I can just go and do it.
• Can I deliberately direct my awareness in order to change how I feel about things by emphasizing positive aspects or de-emphasizing negative ones? What can I enjoy about the things that are good for me? What can I dislike about the things that are bad for me?
• What can I do now to make things better later? How can I take advantage of those moments when I'm focused and everything comes together? How can I make better use of normal moments? How can I make better use of the gray times too, when I'm feeling bleah?
• How can I slowly accumulate value? How can I scale up by making things available?

I think a lot about why I want to do something, because there are often many different paths that can lead to the same results. If I catch myself procrastinating a task again and again, I ask myself if I can get rid of the task or if I can get someone else to do it. If I really need to do it myself, maybe I can transform the task into something more enjoyable. If I find myself drawn to some other task instead, I ask myself why, and I learn a little more about myself in the process.

I plan for small steps, not big leaps. Small steps sneak under my threshold for intimidation – it's easier to find time and energy for a 15-minute task than for a 5-day slog.

I don't worry about whether I'm working on Important things. Instead, I try to keep a list full of small, good things that take me a little bit forward. Even if I proceed at my current pace–for example, accumulating a blog post a day–in twenty years, I'll probably be somewhere interesting.

In addition to the mental work of understanding yourself and shifting your perceptions by paying deliberate attention, it's also good to prepare other things that can help you make the most of high-energy, high-concentration times. For example, even when I don't feel very creative, I can still read books and outline ideas in preparation for writing. I sketch screens and plan features when I don't feel like programming. You can probably find lots of ways you can prepare so that you can work more effectively when you want to.

3. ACT IN TUNE WITH YOURSELF

For many people, motivation seems to be about forcing yourself to do something that you had previously decided was important.

If you've laid the groundwork from step 2, however, you probably have a list of many good things that you can work on, so you can work on whatever you feel like working on now.

Encountering resistance? Have a little conversation with yourself. Find out what the core of it is, and see if you can find a creative way around that or work on some other small thing that moves you forward.

4. ACCUMULATE GRADUAL PROGRESS.

So now you're doing what you want to be doing, after having prepared so that you want to do good things. But there's still that shadow of doubt in you: “Is this going to be enough?”

It might not seem like you're making a lot of progress, especially if you're taking small steps on many different trails. This is where keeping track of your progress becomes really important. Celebrate those small accomplishments. Take notes. Your memory is fuzzy and will lie to you. It's hard to see growth when you look at it day by day. If you could use your notes (or a journal, or a blog) to look back over six months or a year, though, chances are you'll see that you've come a long way. And if you haven't, don't get frustrated; again, embrace your constraints, deepen your understanding, and keep nibbling away at what you want to do.

For me, I usually use my time to learn something, writing and drawing along the way. I've been blogging for the past twelve years or so. It's incredible how those notes have helped me remember things, and how even the little things I learn can turn out to be surprisingly useful. Step by step.

So, if you're feeling frustrated because you don't seem to be making any progress and yet you can't force yourself to work on the things that you've decided are important, try a different approach:

1. Understand and embrace your constraints. Don't stress out about not being 100% productive or dedicated. Accept that there will be times when you're distracted or sick, and there will be times when you're focused and you can do lots of good stuff. Accepting this still lets you tweak your limits, but you can do that with a spirit of loving kindness instead of frustration.
2. Lay the groundwork for action. Mentally prepare so that it's easier for you to want what's good for you, and prepare other things so that when you want to work on something, you can work more effectively.
3. Act in tune with yourself. Don't waste energy forcing yourself through resistance. Use your preparation time to find creative ways around your blocks and come up with lots of ways you can move forward. That way, you can always choose something that's in line with how you feel.
4. Accumulate gradual progress. Sometimes you only feel like you're not making any progress because you don't see how far you've come. Take notes. Better yet, share those notes. Then you can see how your journey of a thousand miles is made up of all those little steps you've been taking – and you might even be able to help out or connect with other people along the way.

Alan has a much better summary of it, though. =)

To paraphrase, you start by examining your desires because that's the only way to know if they're worthwhile pursuits. This thinking prepares you and gives you with a set of things to spend time on immediately whenever you have time, and because you understand your goals & desires and the value they add to your life, you are usually satisfied with the time you do spend.

Hope that helps!

Related posts:

• Learning slack (Dec 2014)
• Growing slowly, adjusting the speed (Oct 2013)

Thanks to Alan for nudging me to write and revise this post!

As I was answering the standard question of “Who are you and what do you do?”, I thought it might be interesting to come up with the percentages for what I actually do based on my time records. After all, I have the data. In the past, I used to export my records to a spreadsheet and do some easy number-crunching. Why bother, though, if I can program the system to do this for me?`

I ended up spending 3.5 hours adding percentages and sparklines to Quantified Awesome, updating my RSpec tests along the way. (100% coverage, yay!) Here's what the result looks like:

The sparklines let me easily see trends and exceptions, while percentages can be easily multiplied by 168 hours to get weekly estimates or 24 hours to get daily ones. For example, sleep took up 35.8% of my time from 2012-02-17 to 2014-06-11, or an average of 8.6 hours a day. Activities directly related to earning money took up 10.9% of my time, or roughly 18.3 hours a week. The sprints and spikes are easier to see with sparklines than with tabular data, and they were easy to implement with JQuery Sparklines.

So now I can be more accurate when answering the question: “What do you do?” It doesn't make sense to include all the minutiae. People don't really answer that question with “Sleep,” even though that takes up much of people's time. However, I can pick a threshold (1%?) and look at the activities above that. That is, for the ~28 months of this 5-year experiment so far, I:

• consult (10.3%)
• connect with people (5.0%)
• write (3.0%)
• draw (2.5%)
• cook (2.3%)
• bike (2.0%)
• work on Emacs (1.2%) and
• work on Quantified Awesome and other tracking tools (1%)

Data! Mwahahaha…

Even though I've got the steady accumulation of DONE tasks showing my slow-but-constant progress, I still sometimes feel like I'm leaving something on the table when it comes to how I use my time. I feel like I'm living with a more relaxed pace, especially compared with the world of work around me or my fuzzed-by-time recollections of pre-experiment and early-experiment days.

I was thinking about how my time use has shifted over the past few years. I compared my percentages in different categories for 2012, 2013, and for 2014 to date. But the numbers say I'm actually spending more time on work and personal projects, and I do seem to manage to check off lots of things on my TODO list. =) So maybe I'm doing okay with this after all, even though sometimes I think I'm slacking off.

Top-level categories:

• Sleep: Pretty consistent (34.5-36.6%) – this works out to 8.3-8.8 hours a day.
• Business: Down, then up lately – 24%, 21%, 26%; but I expect this to be a little lower this year, since I'm taking three months off. =) I'll probably focus on even more writing, drawing, and Emacs geekery then. (And maybe a crash course in a useful skill…)
  

  Avg hours per week	2012	2013	2014 to date
  Earn	20	15	17
  Build	12	13	18
  Connect	8	7	9
  Total	40	35	44

• Discretionary: Up, then down – 18%, 22%, 16%
• Personal care: Pretty consistent (13-14%)
• Chores/unpaid work: Pretty consistent (7-8%)

As before, the business/discretionary trade-off is really the main thing that moves. The rest of my life stays pretty much the same. The second level of categories is worth looking at too:

• Writing is pretty consistent at 3%, or roughly 5 hours a week. Still, I think I'd like to write more. What should get reduced? Ah, video games have been soaking up a little time – although they're exercise too. Hmm, I could intensify that exercise so that I get more out of it. Oh! I've been spending more time gardening lately; that could be another reason. I like both of those alternative activities too, and I think they'll taper off after a while. That's okay, there'll be time enough to write more. Besides, some of my writing is filed under Emacs-related time instead. =)
• Trending up:
  • Drawing (2.0-4.1%): This is good.
  • Planning (0.2-1.5%): Hmm, this is interesting. Am I running into diminishing returns here? Maybe less time planning, more time experimenting.
  • Emacs (0.4-2.8%), and I'm looking forward to spending even more time on this.
  • Relaxing (0.6-2.0%)
• Trending down:
  • Tidying up, cleaning the kitchen (2.3-1.6%) – about 3 hours a week? I should do more around the house (or maybe I am, and I'm not tracking it properly)
  • Working on Quantified Awesome (1.4-0.8%) – steady-state since I'm happy with the code so far?
  • Reading fiction (1.2-0.4%) – subsumed into other activities
  • Socializing (8.0-1.4%) – big drop here; winter, becoming more selective?
  • Networking (4.7-1.7%) – big drop here too; not networking as actively
  • Biking (2.4-0.7%) – but then it's still early in the biking season, and I work fewer days too

I'll continue to focus on gardening for a bit until the garden is more established. I want to exercise and bike more as well. And there's all sorts of Emacs coolness to learn about and share! =) Writing will have to be content with these little snippets–thinking out loud, sharing what I learn, and other things like that–until I can spend more time focusing on developing ideas. Mostly, the increase in time on other activities seems to be coming from the time I used to spend socializing. I actually like this new balance. The stuff I make and share online seems to lead to more ongoing conversations than those hi-hellos at tech events, and I'm still happy to spend a few hours getting to know people or going somewhere.

I got the time numbers from http://quantifiedawesome.com and a bit of spreadsheet number-crunching, and the task numbers from Emacs + Org Mode + R. =) Yay data!