Month of 2021 Quantified

Back in 2019 I did a month of quantified self, every activity was broadly tracked in 1 hour increments in a Google Sheet template I found on Reddit.

It was interesting, but I didn't continue after that one month. Then came 2021, a year marked by my busiest semester ever, juggling many commitments with almost no room for a breather. So I did what anyone would logically do and added another commitment: I began meticulously tracking my time, not just in broad one-hour chunks but down to the very seconds, complete with categories and subcategories.

In terms of major commitments I was juggling:

a half-time job as a sysadmin and DevOps engineer at a High Performance Computing center.
a position as the president of Student Council of the School of IT.
third semester of hardware development with a workload that was beyond the nominal ECTS requirements of a full-time student at TalTech.
social life.
working out.

The whole idea was to answer a very common question I used to get at that time: "just how do you manage all this without a burnout?"

Empirics help, but in essence I also did not know what to answer besides "I just say yes to everything that seems interesting and also - sleep is paramount! ☝️🤓" I mean yes, sleep is still paramount, even if you're not doing a stupid grindset like I was, in fact the amount of sleep one gets is in direct correlation with how much a they can do. But I will just copy-paste from the 2019 post: you can't learn from what you can't observe. Not that you would need to observe every second to be able to grow as a person, but in the long run it definitely did not hurt to have this data.

So did it hurt in the short term? Weeeell... read on! In the last one I focused on raw numbers a lot since there was no real context to that time, my life was and had been quite the same for years, same school, same friends, same old. I focused a lot on my operational lifestyle. Played around with diets and fasting which led me to not get hangry and finding out I can actually focus better when hungry, it turns out my body is fine with starving as it can "just eat later". I experimented with sleep schedules (including some lighter variants of polyphasic sleep), found out my sleep harmony was going to sleep around 1-2am and waking up at 9-10am. I tried studying methods, different ways and times of working out, meditating and all sorts of things: all in all my routines were pretty much set in stone and that gave me time to explore and identify the systems and living mechanisms that resonated most with my mind and body.

It's a bit different for the mandatory military and uni years of turbulence, filled with significant changes in thought and lifestyle that put all of what I had learned and the brain itself through its paces.

So with the following covers the surrounding years to give insight into how I ended up in the classic Estonian Workhorse Grindset™ and how I finally diverged from it.

2019 july - 2020 may

I had just found a new peace with myself after finally nurturing deep friendships and getting over the worst my avoidant attachment behavior and thought patterns. I thought I had more or less figured out who I was and what was the source of my confidence, not to mention all the newfound understanding of my mind and body. I was ready to open up myself to the world, express myself, stop consuming and start creating more. I felt like I could be driving force!

The night before stepping on the bus that would take me to hell and back we shaved our heads with those that also had their own military service buses to catch (but their buses went to what seemed fun camps). It was only after all the fun photoshoots of ridiculous hairstyles before fully shaving that I realized how much of my outward expression I had lost. I looked at the bundle of hair in the bin while listening to the quiet brushing against my teeth after the loud shenanigans we had had minutes before. I glanced up and I can tell you that it wasn't just the depressant effects of the alcohol still in my blood that made my stomach drop. It just wasn't me anymore, I looked so cold without my hair, so unnatural, a little more aggressive.

I thought it wasn't that bad the next morning, but I probably should have taken it as a sign of things to come. I had been told that I had a choice on which bus to step on since I had voluntarily signed up, yet when I arrived no such choice actually existed. Another sign.

When I arrived I understood that they literally could not give a SINGLE FLYING FUCK about any one of us there. We were numbers in a sheet, these numbers already had a place picked out and there was no room for deviation. Each of us possessing very different qualities, knowledge, education, capabilities which could've been useful in so many different ways: reduced to uniform mass of muscle. It didn't matter that there were people in the crowd who knew what spoons were and where to get them, we were all there told to finish soup with knives.

It's not just the inhumanity which we were treated with (both verbally and physically) which could be explained with keeping everyone in line (even though even maintaining discipline does not really justify how awful they were to the conscripts). It's the plain stupidity, laziness, and inefficiency that was driving me crazy. I'm not telling you to drive sustainable, green electric tanks to the front lines, I'm saying maybe it's not necessary to drive a whole convoy around 100+km to find a single lost magazine? Maybe it's not necessary to berate conscripts while they dig moss from between walkways that are cleaned by the cleaning company on the military's payroll anyway just because some higher up was bored?

When you are so off the deep end that you can't not try to propose a better way of doing something you'll be put back in "your place" for doing the job of higher ups: thinking. No expression is allowed, a slight smirk was caught and treated as the sickness of deviation it is. Every single minute of free time was be filled with any random activity to suppress any kind of expression, even that of private and internal. Worst part is that it was effective, soon my peers were talking about nothing but stuff related to the service. It makes sense, like I said all of our time was thinking of or living the military life now, yet it made my unbelievably sad that each of my attempts to talk about anything else was met with a bounce back to whatever frustration they had that morning or similar.

I tried my best to fill every single free second writing to myself, family or friends. But I realized my self was not enough, I needed a feedback to confirm I was not crazy, I needed signs that there were still with working brains and kind people somewhere where I wasn't, that I had somewhere to return to, and there was maybe some hope for me too.

Those deep friendships I mentioned? Turns out that even if you have a lot to relate to with someone does not mean that they will be able to empathise with something that they can not relate to. Or that they will care to empathise? I got almost no support from most of the people I wrote to. After a while I stopped writing and calling almost altogether, no point sending messages into the void. As a result I became selfish and less caring. It was the most effective filter that showed me who really cared despite them not truly understanding the situation I was in. My mother and my best friend. Both of them female, they had no duty nor desire to join the military service, yet they were there for me. Not like many ladies in my life at the time they did not tell me to man up, to not make a big deal of something that was my duty as a man. They held me on my feet with their kindness, even when I lashed out at them from the crushing weights of my frustrations. They reminded not to lose myself. They reminded that my self could flourish once again if I held on, just as my hair would grow back.

With mandatory military service came my second downfall of individuality (after that of puberty) and the taps of my expression were essentially screwed shut. My capabilities, intelligence, all that which I had been praised for years, suddenly all of it was reduced to nothing. All my expression was found as dangerous deviation to the military or annoying whining to most of whom I thought of as my friends. And my self? I just could not trust myself under all that pressure.

During the last 3 months of the military service I lost most of my muscle, I lost weight, I lost all desire to create and express. I became an automata, just consuming media and games, just coasting through whatever orders I was handed. I was so boring and empty, it was insane, they had succeeded in making me a shell that was just sane enough to carry out orders.

We've been livin' in the flames, we've been eatin' up our brains.

Oh, please, don't let these shakes go on

All I lived for in this zombie state was the end date. And in this future oriented I was losing grasp on the present, I lived for the future. Always thinking of when was the next moment I could go to sleep, thinking of how many days it was until the end. Even during the weekends I was able to go home I couldn't really relax, my mind already started wandering to the misery that would await me in just a couple of days.

2020 summer

These shakes did not go on forever. Which led me to the summer of freedom. Which I spent in its entirety playing the Yakuza games. Played Yakuza 0, Yakuza Kiwami and Yakuza Kiwami 2 and in the spirit of this post it feels relevant to mention that it took 143 hours of that summer, averaging around 1.6 hours a day. It became my daily escape and solace, safe space to immerse myself in.

When I wasn't doing a round of Bakamitai karaoke or doing borderline insane heat actions as Kiryu I noticed I had become more selfish, less kind, a lot less expressive as myself.

I had become painfully aware of my insignificance and the true extent of the universes apathy. I had been told I was a genius, that I would do great things, that I would be useful. I felt like it was all a lie, that I had no place. I would be molded into a predestined shape that someone else had formed. Either I would fit through it or perish.

I had no desire to socialize, talk to people, to go out of the house. I felt an "order" in everything people asked of me, reminding me of worse days, leading me having to exert extra will to not become annoyed when people asked small things of me. I was denying every sign of destiny, grasping for autonomy at every possible chance, trying to prove that I had at the very least some power over myself.

I still did go out of the house. There were a couple of bigger birthdays, a longer hike with The Bois, and my friends still invited me to places occasionally even when I did not take initiative. The few times I did go out, I really felt how much worse my ability to form cohesive sentences was - not to mention stories or longer explanations. My ability to care, empathise, to notice what others were feeling had declined.

I felt stuck in myself. Firstly, I had lost the "why" to expressing myself, then over time it seems I also lost a notable part of the "how". Secondly, I felt like no-one cared to ask or listen. I hated it so much, I had to find an audience, I had to rediscover the "why". But I was so wounded and exhausted that I just retreated back to playing videogames instead of working on it.

Rest of 2020 - 2021

From the moment the introductory campus orienteering event (and thus my first unofficial school day) was over I was overloaded with a newfound life force. All the students, freshmen and lecturers I had met, all the student organizations I had learned about, were all so full of life and hope... no, scratch that, it was certainty in a bright future and equally bright present.

I felt that I could be a part of it, add my own piece to it, to find my audience, to find my "why" once more and through that the "how" too.

Suddenly everything that so much as resembled an audience in any way, I was there to go above and beyond. I created and learned Overleaf just to be able to generate the most beautiful graphs and figures, to add "created in LaTeX" at the end of my math homeworks just because I knew that the lecturers would appreciate it. We created an extra "advertisement" video for a completely ridiculous and useless first robotics project that was not part of the grade and gave us "nothing" but the sparkle and respect in the eyes of the lecturers. I spent hours creating a pig mask that saw use only once for a Minecraft themed freshman orientation event. I spent time creating and maintaining a Discord server for our course so that we could share useful information and turn our frustrations into memes. I started going to every public event I could possibly. Everywhere I found an audience, I made sure to leave a mark. Everyone I could be of use to, I would be.

And through all that I found new friends (from my course mostly), a new community (Student Council of the School of IT) to be part of every day. It was salvation, I found the joy of being around nice, intellectually and emotionally capable people again.

People who cared!

People who wanted to do things and not just to get things done but for the sake of itself. People who wanted to do things and not just to get things done but to get them done efficiently and in elegant methods.

And they cared!

They cared about what I had to say. They cared about what influence I wished to have. They cared about being a part of me.

I was relearning what I was capable of, rediscovering the infinite possibilities I had of expressing myself, reexamining my selfishness and the source of it, taking apart my apathy, rebuilding my cynicism back into joy, relearning The Power of Now.

It recontextualized my zombie state into something new - it was as if I was a rubber band that had been stretched to its limit and then released. I was flying at mach infinity, nothing could stop me!

Each semester I took more and more academic credits while maintaining a high enough average grade to warrant 2 stipends for 3 semesters straight. My shoulders could carry more! I accidentally fell into the best possible internship I could have wished for, even though I had no plan of working during uni years. I was elected as the president of the IT Student Council. I was developing personally, socially, academically, professionally and my life was full of things to say "yes!!!" to.

Sidenote: my programme supervisor put a really nice looking Chekhov's gun on the wall of my future in the shape of a recommendation letter to CERN.

And this was the time I decided to start tracking my time again. Just to capture this speed, unstoppable joy in time where things we so so so unbelievably good.

Yet not all was rose colored. My patience, while juggling all these responsibilities and commitments, for example. I felt myself getting irritated when people weren't clear, efficient, getting straight to the point. Anytime I felt someone was wasting my time, I would fly off my handle and walk away if it was possible.

Emptying out my to-do list became the leading force. Once again, in an entirely new way, I was losing the ability to focus on the present. I could not be truly present while there was something on the to-do list and it was constantly being filled with new things. What I really should've done is meditate more, to kind of "clean up" my thoughts. Instead I opted for movies to get lost in or gaming to get into that flow state, both of which were more like really satisfying breaks from the mountain of thoughts looming over me than actual solutions to doing something with the thoughts. But in the moments where my to-do list was empty, my will and discipline were so exhausted that I could not help myself.

I become more jittery, more ADHD-like. I instantly thought of my daily tasks the second I woke up, causing me to forget dreams. It became a new reflex to do everything right away.

I had lost myself in the other direction in an effort to prove that I had power, influence, autonomy to forge my own destiny, that I could smith my own molds.

And to the sound of gunfire, the CERN recommendation letter materialized into an actual future: I would be going to work at CERN for the whole of 2022.

I didn't realize it at the time, since I did not give myself the time to write, think or give my thoughts and self-analysis a more concrete shape that I could work with. It was when I went out of my way to finish the semester early and christmas came. With it also the 2-week vacation from work. And the activity of ITÜK was frozen, since everyone was preparing from exams (that I had done ahead of time) and there were close to no student events.

Overnight most of my commitments were wiped, the to-do list was blank. I had been given back all the time I had took from myself.

2022

After three semesters of finding audiences and doing something for them to prove I had autonomy over myself, I was alone in a new country and decided to swing right into the other extreme and focus all of my time on myself.

France's culture gave me a friendly pat on the back and said "la vie n'est pas faite pour travailler." It hit me how much Estonian culture itself had directed me towards and overly encouraged my maddeningly obsessive every-second-filled schedule. There was no-one to ask me "Why?" or "Could it be unhealthy?", I was only asked "How do you do that? I wish I could be like you!" Now I felt like the odd one out, an absolute maniac running around bumping into people just chilling, focusing on the joys of espresso and quaso~.

It rubbed off on me oh so good.

I started writing again, working out, taking walks, cooking, just chilling in the park. Most crucially, I reconnected with the present.

Besides that new cultures gave way to new perspectives on religion, philosophy. Foremost I understood the muslim world a lot better, giving me the chance to reflect on a past relationship and to recontextualize my empathy. Whereas before I would just not say anything, for my ignorance about religion, I could now understand and really empathise where people were coming from when they talked about their beliefs.

Interestingly, the world seems a lot smaller after the year at CERN. Me going there was hyped up to be as a huge thing. It was all so exaggerated that I really believed it too. "That's it! I will do great things! I'll have the chance to eat and have coffee with gigabrain scientists and engineers! I'll live alone in a foreign country!" I felt that I could taste the endgame of life.

Now I understand that actually life is more or less the same everywhere. Old me, new location. New Person, Same Old Mistakes. Although yes, that external validation that I got from the nature of French culture of working to live not vice versa was significant in its own sense. External will, does, and did influence internal. But I think that in the end it is more about the people I surrounded myself with more than France as a culture that delivered me to the breakthrough. It is not about finding and then adopting a way of doing things for me, its about crafting and finding my own way and then finding people who relate, agree with it.

Our lives are filled with exactly the richness we seek. Travel is just a catalyst to get us up off our sofas and make new friends. Having moved many times, I can assure you that one can do that today without moving.

JackMorgan in comments of Career Advice (2013) hackernews post

And why I raved about this life in France was not because there were things here that are not available in Estonia, but that the same things were of better quality. You can go to adventure parks or go hiking, but it doesn't hold a candle to climbing in the Alps. Yet, no matter how much better things are, at its core it is the same. I don't know why I expected life elsewhere to be drastically different. On the one hand, it is actually liberating: I'll be fine anywhere. On the other hand, it's a bit disappointing too: is that all there is to it?

"You can change your external environment all you want, but you will continue to travel with the one box that will always accompany you. The box known as your mind."

From Travel Is No Cure for the Mind by Lawrence Yeo

Moving is a fantastic way to gain insight into unfamiliar cultures and illuminating ways of life, it is not a cure for discontentment of the mind. I mistook the The Box of Daily Experience to be the same as The Box of My Mind.

In the past, I was very strongly motivated by the feeling that I was always preparing for some future. Middle school? In order to get to university. University? To get a job. What am I preparing for now? The present caught up with the future! In short, it felt like I had 'arrived', as it were. The only way forward was to go inward, not forward or upward.

I have learned and grown, and this will never end, but I hit a point where I wished to find an outlet to my love, to my expression and endless curiosity. I wished to channel all that is me to the persons closest to me, community, my friends, partner. I no longer wanted the grind, or a one-way audience, I wanted a dialogue, dance partners. I wished to both give and take.

2023

Coming back I felt like I was watching the world in slow-motion. Once again I felt like the odd one out, but in the opposite way. Estonia was full of maniacs running around restlessly and I no longer felt the desire to be part of this madness.

I've been walking around with a heightened awareness of my self and my surroundings. I try to notice my instincts to weed out the jitter of the remains of my needless ambition. I do less across the board, for that I am calmer, I say "no" more and focus on the little things instead. I spend a lot more time writing and reflecting.

I've started a war of hugs against productivity in its traditional sense. Eating, hanging out with friends, just sitting and looking around, making love is all productive. I hope that I embody that sentiment and give people the chance to see it that way too.

Analysis

And this is where we get to the numbers part of this quantified self post. The following is the analysis from a month in the aforementioned busiest semester of my life from 2021.

For 27 days, from 2021-10-14 to 2021-11-10, I tracked every single second of my time with a total of 664 hours, 1 minute and 34 seconds of tracked time. I used Toggl Track to track my time and export the results.

Commute

Commuting took 3.78 hours per week on average. Most of it was driving from home to school/work and back, which was a 14 km one way by car. By car it took me 10-20 minutes one way depending on the traffic conditions, 12 minutes on average.

On the other hand: by train and foot it took me 1 hour and 3 minutes one way. So 6-3 times longer! Going by this, using the worse estimation, if I had not used the car, I would've spent 11.34 hours per week on commuting. And this is not accounting for the time waiting and planning the route which also adds some time.

It's not that commuting by public transport is worse by default because it takes longer. That time can technically be used better than the time in the car, since it requires no active focus. It is a choice between freedom of time and freedom of utility. With the car all unnecessary time is shaved off, there is no planning or waiting required, hop in and go. On the other hand, public transport allows for taking an actual break or to use the time to catch up with friends, read a book etc, and is better for slowing the mind. Yet the lack of freedom and requirement to operate on the schedule of the train creates slight yet noticeable stress. By driving a car, I save myself time and thought. The train obliges me to fill the time, car gives me freedom to choose.

Work (HPC)

Gotta give credit to the absolutely wonderful boss and collective at the HPC for giving me the chance to organize the work methods and worked time however I wanted. Being the largest of the commitments in time per week, being so flexible was paramount to organizing everything.

Quite sad that it's not the norm, but the chill and flexible environment really did allow me to focus on work when it mattered the most. Having to grind hours with nothing to do as is the norm in many places would've been a real wrench in the works for me. Being able to take a nap in the office couch and the fact that it was actually encouraged shows how much respect, empathy and insight the boss has.

Student Council of the School of IT (ITÜK)

3.86 hours of work per week, surprisingly little, but that was at a period where the chaos of the fall semester had died down and there was a lot less to do.

With a bit more breathing room in my council schedule, I decided to accept an invitation to brainstorm ideas for the upcoming IT building. To make this process smoother, I arranged visits to the Tartu Delta and EKA buildings, enlisting the help of individuals well-acquainted with these spaces. Their insights revealed a number of ideas, including potential pitfalls, accidental successes, and the preferences of those utilizing these areas.

AND close to 34 hours of socializing time was from ITÜK, easily at the top of the list of socializing time spent. Here's where categorizing was a little difficult, because technically being present, networking, and socializing was also a part of the job.

School

That semester I took 42 European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System (ECTS) academic credits. Note that 1 ECTS is supposed to be 26h of work (it never is that much, but whatever), which means 42 ECTS should in principle total around 1092 hours over the course of 16 weeks. Taking that into account it should've resulted in more or less 68.25 hours spent on school per week.

I totalled 12.31 hours per week during the time of my tracking period: a miniscule 18% of the expected workload! Not sure if this says more about my abilities to optimize the absolute living daylight out of the programme or the lacking programme itself.

Worth noting that during tracking I was doing a a considerable amount of catching up in order to realign with my schedule after the typically hectic and social first half of the semester during which I had put off some schoolwork until later. I would expect the total semester average to be even lower since it was a busier period for school during the tracking, but no actual data to back that up.

Self

The Self category is about the time directed towards and for myself.

Entertainment

Passive media took in total. Of which movies was 15.25 hours, theatre 5 hours, shows 2 hours, anime 1.3 hours, reading only 18 minutes. Just scrolling the web, Reddit, YouTube took almost 69 hours, easily the largest time sink.

Read 1 book: "Paradoxes" by Enn Kasak. I did not finish this during the tracking, continued reading it after the tracking period.

Saw 2 plays:

Fairy Tale Arch (Elina Masing @ Kanuti Gildi SAAL)
The Master and Margarita (@ Vene Teater)

Watched 11 movies:

Burning
Man On Wire
Bad Trip
Sleeping with Other People
Tomb Raider
Mr and Mrs Smith
Dune Part 1
The Discovery
Climax
Revenge
Ferris Buellers Day Off

Active media took 22.5 hours in the form of gaming.

Played 3 games:

Battlefield 4
Deep Rock Galactic
Star Wars: Fallen Order

Operational time

Operational maintenance describes the ongoing effort required to keep living and it bit close to 37 hours from the schedule. This consists of time maintaining physical and mental health. So anything from eating, showering to task management and meditating.

During tracking I had 3 meditation sessions:

43 minutes walking the dog
5 and 3 minutes focusing on breathing

Operational improvement describes time spent setting up or smoothing the processes of operational maintenance and that took 3.5 hours.

Creative

The only time spent actually creating something for myself was editing photos for 3.75 hours.

Sad :(

I did not realize at the time, but looking back it would've been so nice for myself to focus more on expression.

Sleep

During the time of tracking the average daily sleep was 8.5 hours. Longest being 10 hours and shortest being 6.3 hours.

Sleep was probably the single most important factor in being able to keep all this up for the whole semester:

I could not have afforded getting sick.
It would not have been possible for me to context switch and focus on everything as efficiently.
Everything is worse on a lack of sleep and my moods would have taken an especially hard hit.

Social

Most of my time socializing was spent with ITÜK, close to 34 hours + 4.5 hours with the ITÜK board. The next largest was with friends, 29 hours to which can also be added time spent with The Bois, 9.5 hours.

I would've wanted to hang with The Bois more than 2 times during the tracking month, but such is the pain of trying to fit together the schedules of 5 adult people during uni years. Which actually lead to me spending most of my socializing within ITÜK. Being so active in (as to become the president of the board) ITÜK was my way of trying to find and build my community and a third place as it were. Funnily that was both the best and worst place to find a tight-knit community. Obviously I did find my place there and had a wonderful time there, but the nature of this particular organization is that the member activity period is very short by nature, 1-2 years. Best in short term, worst in the long term when everyone had moved on, gotten a job, or graduated. Every year there is a little over 100 new interested members, a huge influx of new faces and little by little they drown out the older circles. Older circles which wither or find a new place outside the organization. But what I got from it was a sense of what a community could be. I was surrounded by people who really cared about making a difference and doing things properly. The rest of the board handled their duties with such care and effort that I almost never had to keep my fingers on their pulse, we could all rely on each other and trust that promises would be kept and disasters would be worked through together.

With family I spent 16 hours.

Digital socializing consisted of 14.5 hours on the phone and 1 hour on e-mail. All in all that is 92.5 hours socializing in person and and 15.5 digitally.

Workout

Managed to make it to gym 5 times over the course of 27 tracked days and had no time to run (probably no desire either considering the weather during fall).

Graphs of Data

Total pie chart:

Total pie chart

All weeks combined:

All weeks combined graph

Week 1: 2021-10-11 to 2021-10-17

Week 1 graph

Week 2: 2021-10-18 to 2021-10-24

Week 2 graph

Week 3: 2021-10-25 to 2021-10-31

Week 3 graph

Week 4: 2021-11-01 to 2021-11-07

Week 4 graph

Week 5: 2021-11-08 to 2021-11-14

Week 5 graph