A previous boss taught me that "you can't manage something until you can measure it". You have to be careful to measure the right things, obviously ...... but I got thinking about how I use my time. At work I have to measure my time, though no-one knows quite how of why its used. But how I use my 'spare' time is important to me, so I decided to start measuring it. Then I'll know whether I need to manage it better.After some hunting and testing I settled on KronoX, a simple open-source application for Mac OS X to record what I do. I started by just tracking my sleep, and then moved onto the main types of chores, relaxation, ministry and (inevitably) my work hours. These are the things I could change; I'm ignoring meals, and getting up, and other things I can't really do much about.I started with my sleep patterns. Just how much sleep do I really get? Here's one view of it ...
(Hour intervals run 10pm to 11am from left to right. Amount of sleep in the hour is shown by how dark the blue colour is. The days go down the page.)Nice graphic, but lots of not-very-encouraging holes where I wake up in the middle of the night. Further analysis shows that maybe it's not as bad as it looks: I'm still getting on average of 7.6 sleep hours per night. I'm continuing to work to produce more interesting analysis and graphs from this, but there I'll pause for now.