Take 1 month to polish your categories and definitions

During the process of defining the category definition, especially in the first 1 to 3 months, the category adjustments will be very frequent, as you are constantly adjusting your prioritization based on your historical data, including the layout of the icons.

In the stage of frequently adjusting the categories, you will inevitably encounter a situation where you keep adding and subtracting categories and the original data will break, that is, if you set "Bath" and "Brush" in the beginning, but when you find that it is not necessary to separate bathing and brushing teeth, so you unify bathing and brushing teeth into one category of "Rinse", you need to file the original "Bath" and "Brush" and then create a new "Rinse" activity.

aTimeLogger Android doesn't have an "archive" feature.

Archiving means that the data is not used in the future, the software front-end is no longer displayed, but the data remains in the software, then we can export the data to Excel to manually merge them.

Select in TimeTrack, More - Report - Select All Time - Export CSV, open in Excel and filter the categories you need to merge (e.g. "Bath" and "Brush"), select Rename to "Wash".

After a few months, pretty much all of your classifications at this stage are fixed, and as long as there are no new breakthroughs in your life, such as getting married and having children, etc., the classifications won't change much.

At this point you can create an "Activity Definition Table" that specifies all the actions included under the categories, avoiding the hassle of switching. Let's say you suddenly get a directive saying, "Put together a programme of activities for me at once", what exactly is that programme? How is the scheme written? It all requires you to think again, and it takes time to react, but if you get a directive that says, "Turn off the power to the drinking fountain," it's a clear action, and you know what to do immediately, without thinking.

Most of the activities contain many actions, such as "work" may include "meeting", "write a plan", "field" and so on, so if you can clear which specific actions are included in each activity, when you need to switch the activity time will be fast and accurate, no need to think, improve efficiency.

With a better memory than a bad pen, I took the time to put together a "definition of activity table", as follows：

Activity definition table

Whenever I run into a situation where I don't know how to classify, I look at the definitions in the table, classify them normally if they already exist, think about where they should fit, and then fix the definition table.

The definition table records what actions (characteristics) each classification contains, in addition to profit and loss markers and time allocation.

When your categories are fixed, you need to set a "time goal" for yourself, assuming 168 hours per week in "weeks", how will you allocate them, which activities have upper limits and which have lower limits?

From my observations, I think the time distribution I aspire to is this:

Also, when setting time goals, you need to know "What does each target percentage really represent?"

Represents the contents of the "Remarks" column of my definition table.

Assuming we follow the desired time allocation and ensure that recreation and leisure time does not account for more than 8% of the week, this means that "with 168 hours in a week, you only have 13.4 hours to spend on recreation and rest, less than 2 hours per day on average." Then do the split of those 2 hours into 30 minutes a day to rest, 30 minutes to play with your phone, and 1 hour to watch video, which is the actual meaning behind each percentage you set.

That said, I'm not asking you to set your "time goal" immediately as you would like it to be allocated.

Never, especially not a novice!

Everyone's pace of life is different, and the ideal target optimization is to "float around 30% of historical data".

Let's say you previously had 30 hours of entertainment per week at 18%, which ideally would also be reduced to 12.5 hours per week at most. If you really follow the 8% goal, which is to have your recreational time immediately drop from an average of 4.2 hours per day to an average of 2 hours per day, how about weekdays, how about weekends? Can you guarantee self-discipline to the point where it only takes 2 hours?

The most likely scenario is that you hold out for a week, then feel that you can't go on, start "retaliatory consumption", entertainment time out of control, bounce back to the original level, if this is the case, not only can not complete the goal, but also hit your self-confidence.

Of course, if you want to be tough, you're a man!

There is an old saying, "Take the method above, and get only the middle; take the method middle, and get only the below."

The implication of this statement is that if we set a high standard, we may end up with only a medium standard, and if we set a medium standard, we may end up with only a low standard.

"Take the method above, and get only the middle" is a perfect illustration of the change that Rigid brought to me.

Initially my "fun" time was 10%, and after setting a 6% target limit, whenever I saw a red alert for fun time on the target page, I had to tell myself I couldn't spend any more fun time.

But time is constant, if you leave it empty for a period of time, you can't flow to "entertainment", you can only control it to flow elsewhere, preferably to gain time, and then I choose "reading" as a replacement for "entertainment" in all gain time.

This shift has led me to increase my reading time by 40% a year, which means that when I set a strict standard for my "recreational" time, when I'm nearing my goal, I start to think about what time is available to fill that gap.

Now "reading" is slowly becoming my entertainment, and I'm limited in my entertainment time, but I don't want to do something too distracting, such as "writing", "planning", etc. When I'm doing an activity, I turn on "reading".

"I never thought that reading would become my entertainment time.

If you haven't had confrontational success before, don't think about it once, let's be honest and go step by step, I don't want you to be under too much pressure.