Diving deeper with personal analytics

In my first post of 2022, I shared some analytics of my life tracking data for the last 6 years. I couldn't help myself going down the rabbit hole with additional questions that could be used to trigger additional self reflection, which would then spark me to make deliberate changes in my life. It was quite fun going down the rabbit hole playing with AWS Quicksight and manipulating data fields to get to the answers I sought. 

When I have more time to play around, I think an AI/ML personal assistant should use my data to help me with insights. I believe there will be a market in personal analytics or metrics, or personal telemetry that I've coined the termed personametry back in 2015. At that time I wanted to build a product based on my RAGE model called personametry. Alas, that project is still on the backburner, and I've made a ton of excuses (to be honest) not getting it off the ground. Yes, my work got in the way, reality of family and financial obligations, then complacency and comforts-of-life (aka laziness). If I was serious about it, I would've made a plan. I resigned to keep tracking my data, keeping abreast of the progress of personal assistants, productivity apps and personal tracking devices, looking for the timing when things begin to fall into place!!

If you have additional questions you think might inspire changes & personal improvements, let me know in the comments section!

How do I breakdown my 24-hour days?

This is an interesting question. I decided to splice my 24-hours into "periods" and so I ended up with 8 (eight) partitions of the day. Since I track the start and end of my activities (tasks) captured in Harvest, I should be able to see how I utilize my time in a typical day. There is a missing element of productivity/impact as a result of that activity, which is a topic for another day.

Here is the code for splitting up a day, using a datetime field, in Quicksight:

I don't start my day at midnight and count 24 hours. Rather I account for the 24 hours from the point of going to bed or starting my day at 4am. I used to consistently begin my days at 4am for 2016-2020, but since relocating to Cape Town, it's been a struggle. I'm going to have to renew this habit in 2022. The partitioning of 24 hours days is not impacted though.

In addition to splicing the parts of day, I could look at how my routines differ between weekdays and weekends. For weekdays, I haven't yet filtered out real workdays, that is, not a public holiday or a leave day. 

With this new partitioning I can then answer these questions like:

2021 Life/Work streams review with 6 years data points

It's that time of the year when I review my personal time keeping metrics showing how I've spent my time over the previous year. I've been doing this exercise diligently since 2015, when I created a framework for myself called "RAGE" Reality, Aspirations, Goals, Expectations. Using ideas from software engineering and product management, I decided to map out my personal (life) and professional (work) streams across the many dimensions I was involved in (Muslim | Individual | Professional | Husband | Father | Friend | etc.). I focused on Time as the key metric to track, since time is one of the most important resource that should never be squandered. 

The idea is simple: if something is important to me, then I should be spending time in that area - but if I end up spending little or zero time on that thing, then that thing must have not been as important to me as I thought it was. 

Tracking time allows me to answer questions like: 

• Am I spending time in the areas that are important to me? 
• Which areas am I over indexing on that negatively impacts my other steams, robbing me of value?
• Am I giving each stream the necessary amount of attention?
• What decisions do I need to make when the data and anecdotes (feelings / instincts) don't match up?

Click here to check out my writings from previous years and here for an introduction to my RAGE framework for personal development tracking.

To read my 2020 review and reference my personal value system, click here.

2021 Re-starting Life & Work (again)

Driven by my personal planning through my RAGE model, 2021 was the year I hit reset. I uprooted my family and relocated from Johannesburg to Cape Town in December 2020. Earlier in 2020, I'd resigned from my C-level position of a very stable and secure job - at first - to take a year long sabbatical to work out my next move. This sabbatical was short-lived due to the uncertainty of Covid-19, I felt it too risky not to secure another job in 2021. I knew one thing for sure: I was no longer interested in building video entertainment technology applications "make people watch TV" and wanted to branch out into something else either in Cloud or e-Commerce. Thankfully I landed the first job I decided to interview for in cloud computing with AWS, Cape Town. A big departure for me because I was going back to core engineering building software, something which I've not done to that level of technical detail since 2010! I was also going to start as a senior manager and not a GM/CTO. So essentially I'd walked away from a high influence, high referent and hierarchical power, entrenched credibility and track record - to starting professionally all over again, from a "big fish, small pond" to being a "tiny fish, large ocean" fella, with zero credibility. I value learning new knowledge, building new relationships and gaining new experiences as more important than positional titles. My wife and kids also left their lives behind which we'd nurtured for a decade since relocating to Johannesburg (from UK), relocating and disrupting their lives to Cape Town with me - they too, hitting reset leaving much loved friendships, community and family-support behind. 

So 2021 would bring a massive disruption to my personal, professional and family streams. Time will tell if this grand reset is working or not. So my personal time tracking data is now more important than before.

This post shares my time tracking data for 2021 compared to the previous 6-years for comparison. Resetting one's life personally and professionally is not an easy thing to do. I've learnt much about this experience that I hope to share in future posts. In terms of the key KPIs of time tracking, 2021 went as well as can be expected considering the unusual context & challenges of Covid-19. In this post I share only the data and limited insights. There's some soul-searching I've yet to do on making drastic changes to my personas, which at the time of this writing doesn't seem to be major...

With year one done, so far, so good...no major regrets although the data has shown I need to recalibrate some streams if I want to get back to previous levels of balance.