When Is a Wasted Half-Hour Not Really A Wasted Half-Hour?

I started tracking my days in half-hour increments after finishing Laura Vanderkam’s Off the Clock: Feeling Less Busy While Getting More Done. Unlike Vanderkam, I track things old school instead of using an excel document: Every morning I wake up, note the time in my bullet journal, and mark off a series of half-hour increments down the page.

Then I fill them in as the day progresses, noting the time spent faffing about on the internet and actually doing work. Noting any major turns in my day, where somethings happen to redirect my attention. Often, noting down word counts achieved or specific things read.

It’s not the first time I’e done this–all sorts of productivity advice suggests doing this sort of thing to get a firmer understanding of how you’re actually using time–but those usually suggested doing it for a week.

I just hit the end of my first week, and I plan to keep on going this time. What I’m really interested in the kind of data Vanderkam gathered by doing this exercise for years, both in terms of the data collected about patterns as they shift and the increased mindfulness about how time is used.

Still, there is something to be said for even a week of doing this. I’ve already realised that the activity I like to call “Digital Faffing” takes up both more time in my day than I’d like, but also casts a long shadow over my psyche. Basically, I can spend 45 minutes checking things out on the internet–social media, blogs, checking numbers on various book sales sites–and my brain will take that 45 minutes and assume that I’ve just wasted two hours and therefore suck.

The time wasted doesn’t match the level of self-loathing I feel for wasting that time instead of getting something productive done. And that means the half-hour can quickly become more than that, simply because I’ve already started down a dark path of procrastination and self-loathing and it will forever will it dominate my destiny.

As is traditional when I start tracking these kinds of things, brains are an unreliable. My felt sense of how things are going is poorly calibrated with reality (which shows that deep study time will often blow out past the hour I allocate it every day, devouring three hours instead).

Tracking also reveals something useful: my online faffing also turns into something useful from time to time–fifteen minutes or digital faffing occasionally turns into a half-hour or hour spent engaging with a long-read, or picking up a half-finished online course and actually taking notes as i engage with it. Often, it will transition into some fine-tuning on the Brain Jar Press front–looking for upcoming promotion opportunities and adjusting copy.

Busy work, but useful busy work that does need some focus and isn’t currently in the laissez-faire approach to time management that sets in between Christmas and New Years celebrations.

And, ultimately, it pushes more of my attention onto the fact that the way I use time is a choice. There are obligations and demands, but also little gaps where I can take a step towards a long-term goal rather than surrender the half-hour to killing time.