My 2017 timesheet; I have 100% time tracking for the last 24 months

I use basic calendaring tools like iCal or Google Calendar to manually track my historical data, silo'd into 12 different calendars which represent categories of time spent. I've become comfortable enough in the software interface to only spend ~3-5m day updating. This time investment is acceptable for now, I haven't found the right solution to automate the entirety of this data collection accurately.

In this view (historical calendar) I simply want to have a log/journal for each day which I can reference in the future. I don't want to write the details of my D&D session with friends on the calendar, I just want to know we played D&D and where we did it. If there ARE things I want to recall, I can put them in the notes field with ease.

I group together by color for at-a-glance insights. Blue = daily routines, health & wellness. Red = purely escapism or distraction from my goal. Green = goal-oriented work or billable work. .

When I'm working on devices I have RescueTime Premium installed which gives me a high granularity look on how I spend my screen-time. I have the luxury of being a self-employed developer and thus can more or less direct my energy into what interests me and also make money doing so, but as many of you may know this takes discipline and self-awareness.

Problems I've found include centralized goal-setting, task planning and in-tool time metrics. There have been some solutions out there that haven't really succeeded. GCal has actually made great strides this past year in improving their core product overall... I still don't think its perfect but that's obviously subjective. Big thanks to your team, if you're reading this.

I like low-friction, high-flexibility tools. I'd love to build a more detailed "continuous integration for humans," but I'm not ready to share any of that work yet it's all in ideation phase and needs revision before publishing.

To accomplish this I keep calendars for around 10 categories of what I spend my time doing. It's created a nice dataset useful to basically me.

I also use a Huginn installation in my server rack (a laptop on my bookshelf lol) to automate things like Harvest time tracking into calendar items and some other business-logic level tasks. I hope to explore more of this in 2018!

All in all it's an experiment in self awareness. The rough hypothesis is that if I'm collecting more data about myself I'll become more self aware of positive and negative behavior patterns. Certainly this isn't a new concept, but with the ease of collection I don't see a reason to stop or slow down.

Can you elaborate on your data collection? What devices and software did you use? I would like to try it myself :)

You should exercise alot more.