My RAGE life logging April update

At the start of this year (2016), I made a firm resolution to keep track of the things that matter to me, in whatever aspect of my life (which I call "Personas") [As a Husband, Father, Blogger, Professional Consultant, Friend, etc.] - when I developed a model called RAGE which stands for Reality Aspirations Goals Expectations. 

For each Persona, I interrogated each strand: What is my current reality (the situation as it stands - is it good, bad, healthy, needs work, etc.).  What are my Aspirations (where would I like to ultimately see my self as this person?). Can I set some short, medium, long-term goals? What can I expect to achieve (given the reality)?

I ended up creating a set of 22 Personas, which I ranked and prioritized toward the tail end of January. I then decided to track the time spent in each of these roles, checking against the goals that I'd set. Since February, I have logged a total of ~2,236 hours, which roughly works out to 93 days (24 hours) which is just over 3 months of data. I have religiously logged every activity related to a persona, using the popular timekeeping software from Harvest. And now that it's become a habit, I will continue to do so for the remaining 9 months, lets see how long it goes on for.

April Insights

Three months of data has now revealed some interesting insights - the month of May has called for a course correction. More of this later. Looking at April, this is how I spent my time:

In terms of the top 10 areas I spent my time in April:

And comparing the last three months, for each of the Personas, according to the rankings I set out for in the beginning of the year:

The shaded area in yellow shows the top 10 personas that emerged from my ranking exercise at the start of the year. There were some obvious red areas that has now forced me to recalibrate going forward into May...

Here is a month-by-month view of the top 10 areas:

Recalibrating Personas for the next 3-month Iteration

Given this data, it has forced me to re-assess some of the areas in my life. One of my hypotheses was that I may just be infatuated with a certain area, the proof would be that if I was really interested and committed to something, then I would make an effort to work on it. It so happens, after much reflection, I have now adjusted my personas in the following way:

• Improving my technical skills as a coder is now more important to me than being an investor, job hunter, software professional or a potential company employee. Moved up from 7 to 13 in the rankings.
• Whilst being an investor is an aspiration, the fact is that I don't really have tons of money to invest in, and that trading in JSE is more of an experiment in savings than a major part of my life. If I were to ask myself the question "who am I really?" I would rather identify myself more as Coder/Software/Innovator than an Investor. So Investor has moved down from 14 to 8 in the rankings.
• Job-Hunter: This has become a background activity. It is no longer as important as it was to me in the beginning of the year. With all other things going on in my life, I am comfortable with my current situation, and therefore this persona does not need prominence in the top 10 anymore. I will still respond to head hunters and seek out potential opportunities linked to my aspirations, but it's now becoming a stealth activity. Moved down from 15 to 6.
• Potential Company Employee - similar to job hunting, this persona should really disappear off-the list, anyway it has moved down from 12 to 2.

So I've re-calibrated my Personas, meet Persona Ranking Matrix Version 2 for the next 3 months:

Outlook going forward

With the recalibration done, the tracking history, with the new top ten looks like this:

New baseline for tracking

Reflections

Since the start of the year, I've made a commitment to focus on improving the areas of my life:

• As a Husband, I've made headway into spending quality one-one-one time with my spouse. I just need to maintain it going forward. Doing this has taken a hit on my work, but being a consultant, it has made it far more easier for me to set aside time, during the work-week. I believe that alone time is important to nurture and grow the relationship, time with the kids is seen as family time (a separate activity). I will try to continue to taking a morning off out of my work-time to focus on this.
• As a Father, I'm spending a decent amount of time with my kids. My eldest son has most of my time these days because of his interest in becoming a Hafiz.
• As a Muslim, it is becoming a constant background activity again. Whilst some people (Muslims) might be surprised by my openness, praying 5 times a day is kinda expected, and the norm - but in reality, it needs work. Not only this, one needs to go beyond the basics and really try living completely, it's a state of mind and heart, that is quite difficult to achieve. I am on the road, there will be uphills and downhills...since starting tracking data again, I am hitting a rate of completing one complete Quran recitation every three months...it's a start. I try not to be dogmatic in this area, I'm no saint...being in control of emotions / anger / discipline / calmness is the ultimate aspiration (and I'm quite far away from that!).
• As an Innovator/Entrepreneur - the going has been tough. The hours I spend focusing on this is the early hours of the morning, and weekends. Being a consultant again helps, as I can take time out from work (which means not getting paid) and focus on my ideas. I am pleased with the progress I'm making with Personametry, and have decided to focus on just one idea at a time (I have tons of them).
• As a Technical person, software programmer or coder - I have decided to focus on this more. If I am to start up my own product, like Personametry, to save money and resources, I should just do it myself (which means learning to code in the modern web app / iOS / Android frameworks). I'm an old C/C++/MFC/Windows coder...
• As an Individual, pursuing hobbies, health and fitness is really a weekend activity. With winter coming, I need to look at better ways of indoor training, and also complement training with other learning activities (like podcasts, etc.). I have regressed on my cycling since March (used to ride alone on the road, but recently been put off by the crime and now looking at cycle parks as the safer option)...I also need to work on cutting down the time I spend Resting/Sleeping, trying to bring it to around 6 hours of sleep every day, and need to improve my boot-up time, takes me 30-45 minutes from the point of switching the alarm off, to hitting the keyboard!!

If I were to map my 24-hour day....

The experiment continues...here's a version of how my 24-hour day could look like going forward the next three months:

What else am I up to?

Personal Kanban

This is a post for another day, just to give you an idea: Before my RAGE model, I maintained different Trello boards for the different things I was focused on. Each board had its own TODO list, which made it difficult to track. I also had one board called my "General Brain Desktop" as a dumping ground for any idea/thought that popped in my head. These boards grew over time, making it a bit messy...so I'm in the process of consolidating ALL into just one board, my Personal Kanban board. So far I've got hundreds of cards spanning all 22 Personas. I've shared this board with my wife, so she has a view into my mind-space...

Personametry Heart Rate Variability (HRV) Tracking w.r.t. Stress Monitoring

For the month of April, I've logged my heart rate diligently, daily day-in, day out. Took it to work every day, took samples before-and-after meetings. Took samples when I'm driving. Took samples when I was doing this (blogging), or playing with kids, or spending time with my wife...This experiment is about measuring my HRV and drawing relationships between HRV and Personas/Activities - and checking if I could get some readings about Stressful situations...Expect another blog post in May.

Jozi Quantified Self & Personametry Meetup Group

I went out on a limb and set up my own Meetup group for Personametry. Twelve people have already signed up for this, so I need to work on running my very first meetup soon...

RAGE Life Logging, Iteration 2 of many, March 2016

Earlier this year I created a model called RAGE, which stands for Reality, Aspirations, Goals, Expectations - a planning model that can be used in all sorts of manner. I'm using it to track my own personal & professional development. I ended up defining just over 20 areas of my life that I need to give time to, had prioritized these "Personas" and set about some goals to achieve for each one. I try to maintain a high level of focus around the top 10 personas, monitoring the rest in between. I am two months down into my tracking, this post shares insights for March 2016.

My goal was to start measuring my time spent in these various areas - either validating or invalidating my instincts. A friend of mine recently challenged me, quite rightfully so "Mo, why are you doing all of this?? Surely you know, deep down instinctively the areas you spending time in and the ones you're not? What did you learn from this data that you didn't know before?"

That is an interesting question indeed. I wanted to measure and quantify the time I'm actually spending against what I instinctively "know" I should be doing. For me, measurement is important because data often highlights interesting insights that we wouldn't have observed, or taken time to reflect - often because of the mental and emotional biases we all have.

One outcome would be that my measurements reflect one-to-one what I always knew; on the other hand, the numbers may just show weaknesses in my own aspirations. Just as you need to measure your progress with your physical fitness / nutritional planning, why wouldn't you want to measure how, where and what you're spending your life doing? Measurement allows you to take corrective action and steer your ship in the direction you'd like. Often we live our lives, day-in, day-out, accepting the routine as a fact-of-life, robbing ourselves of the opportunity to instigate meaningful changes...for me, being able to quantify my life, is helping define the person I want to be, in the next chapter of my life. Soon I'll be in my forties, we never know what's around the corner (quite literally, two weeks back I lost a nephew in a senseless armed robbery, 32 years old - life is cheap in South Africa)...

Am I Crazy??

In my previous post, I posed the question: Am I crazy for doing this stuff? I still maintain, nope I am not, maybe a little OCD, but I am so vested in this now more than ever. Besides, I recently found a massive Quantified Self community online and across the world that are engrossed in this area of personal measurement. So I'm really not alone in this journey :-)) I am going to start my own QuantifiedSelf meetup in Johannesburg this year, in what I hope will be the first of its kind in South Africa. Just take a look at this guy, from a few years back - this guy actually logged his life over a period of 6 years! What more vindication does one need? :-))

March 2016 Insights 01-Mar to 31 Mar (756.77 hours)

Personametry - Idea Validation

I came across this guy whilst doing my research into Personametry idea. I believe I'm on the right track, and that there's still opportunities to play in this space.

I talked about Personametry in a previous post here: http://khanmjk-outlet.blogspot.co.za/2015/10/personal-metrics-leading-to-self-aware.html

Check this out:

Tracking progress of my RAGE plan, snapshot 1 of many

Earlier this year I created and shared my RAGE model aimed at making sense of my own personal planning, to get to a point of balancing my work/life activities. I had sliced myself into 22 different personas, and for each persona, defined my current reality, aspirations, goals and expectations to achieve in 2016 going forward. I also found a way of prioritizing and ranking these personas using my own ranking matrix. Once I had those defined, the next step was to start collect the data, do the measurements, analyse, get insights, and then make adjustments if required. Run the experiment for a few months, until I've collected enough evidence to help demystify the path I should take. 

This all started toward the end of January this year, and I'm happy to report I've diligently kept up with this experiment, and am ready to share this experience with my first progress review!

How did I manage the Time Keeping?

I use HarvestApp for time keeping. It is a simple, powerful way of keeping track of your activities. Used by people to track time spent on clients / projects / tasks, I created a personal project and added as tasks, each of the Personas/Subject pairs I split myself up as. I am using the free version which is working beautifully. So from my phone, using the app, I can very quickly switch between tasks and start the timers off. It does take some getting used, to consciously remember to log the hours - it becomes second nature after a while (my daily tracking is close to 24 hours with +- 4% error tolerance).

Recap the personas I ranked myself as split into:

This became the basis as "project tasks" in Harvest, with a bit more detail to focus on the specific subject.

Data Captured from Harvest (29-Jan-16 to 05-March-16)

From the January 29th to March 5th, I had logged a total of 873.61 hours on Harvest, with 96% accuracy, given that in this time period of 38 days (912 hours), not too bad going for the first iteration of this experiment. Here's a report generated from Harvest:

Report view generated from Harvest

Analytics (Personametrics)

Harvest comes built in with some very basic reporting, I needed to make sense of this data in different ways, like in my best tool of choice Excel(!), which Harvest caters for exporting the data straight to Excel, where you can do nice things with Pivot Tables & Charts :-)

Just focusing on the Top 10 activities that featured out of the 873.61 hours, and getting a percentage split of my time, the picture looks like this:

How I spent my time over 38 days from 29-Jan to 05-Mar 2016

So this is what I've picked up - on average....

• I spend 8.5 hours a day working as a Service Provider to my Client (MCA) - over a third of my day is spent working
• I spend 7.97 hours day Sleeping / Resting (which involves reading before bedtime) - another third of my 24-hour day
• I dedicate 3.5 hours a day on Family Time (this is the collective family time like dinner/movie time, school runs, but not one-on-one time with each member of the family)
• I practice my spirituality (prayer, Quran recitation, etc.) for just over an hour each day
• I spend just over an hour each day related to activities with my eldest child (10 year old son)
• I'm not doing too bad with my health & fitness goals, about 16-18 hours a month cycling or running 

Overall the breakdown over 38 days (percentage of total hours):

Row Labels	Sum of Hours
[Individual] Rest n Sleep	34,647%
[Consultant] Consulting - Service Provider to MCA	24,387%
[Family-Man] Family Time	16,047%
[Muslim] Spirituality - Practice n Awareness	4,762%
[Father] Relationship with Muhammad-Jawad	4,078%
[Husband] Marital Relations - Spending time with Fathima	3,228%
[Consultant] Knowledge-Base - Books	2,577%
[Individual] Health & Fitness - Cycling n Running	2,088%
[Business Owner] AS3 Time	1,730%
[Individual] Me Time (Nothing, PC/Surfing, Silence - Alone Time)	1,640%
[Community Member] Community NBHW Patrols	1,273%
[Friend] Social Being a Friend	1,148%
[Colleague] Work Social Relationships	0,553%
[Son] Relationship with Mommy	0,481%
[Blogger] Writing articles	0,317%
[Individual] Driving Car Time	0,244%
[Consultant] Service Provider Partners	0,228%
[Home Owner] Home Improvements	0,207%
[Father] Relationship with Ahmad	0,165%
[Job Hunter] Job Hunting Companies	0,096%
[Individual] Health & Fitness - General Well Being	0,072%
[Innovator Entrepreneur] New Product Ideas	0,027%
[Father] Relationship with Sarah	0,005%
Grand Total	100,00%

Insights 

Now that I've got the data, how do I measure and compare against my initial planning, in terms of the focus areas for my personas that I'd ranked in importance when I started?? What if in reality I am focusing on other areas that are not ranked in my persona top 10?? 

I've decided not to make any drastic changes to my rankings until I've allowed three months of measurement, however, I could start looking at tweaking, fine tuning the following areas:

• I'm not spending enough quality time with my wife as I hoped (1:1 outside of the kids / family time)
• I'm probably sleeping too much, look at getting my sleeping hours down between 6-7 hours. Aim is to hopefully reach a level of fitness that could help with me coping with 6 hours sleep.
• I'm not getting enough time to focus on my own business AS3
• I'm not allowing enough time to push through my ideas / new product development stream
• I've not made any progress connecting with software / startup professionals (need to attend at least one meetup event a month)
• I'm not evenly spreading my Father-time across the three kids, currently it's skewed towards the eldest child
• I should probably move "Job Hunter" to a low priority now since I'm fully booked as a consultant for this year already (but I will still keep an eye out for CXO / GM / Director opportunities, or a fantastic startup venture for personametry)
• The same with "Potential Employee" - I am happy remaining a consultant for this year, unless an opportunity as above presents itself
• I should probably move "Investor" to low and bump up Entrepreneur, Software Professional & Programmer

Based on the original rankings set out in January, this is how I've performed:

Am I just plain old Crazy??

Maybe so, it depends on your point of reference :-) Time will tell...all I know is that I'm finding this experiment quite interesting to me personally, it is making me see things in a different light, I'm hopeful that after three months, it will help me settle on the core personas of value, leaving a lot the noise all behind...I still feel strongly that just as we can see a future for self-driving cars, I see a future where people are into personametrics to improve their self-worth, and lives around them...

Tips on how to gracefully disagree

I am currently reading through the classic 1930's writings of Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People. Still a classic, and still pretty much relevant today, which struck me in the same awe as my earlier encounter with Elbert Hubbard's works. If you haven't read this book, please get a copy soon! 

I am quoting some tips from Part Three, Chapter One on how to keep a disagreement from becoming an argument (that Carnegie himself sourced from an article in Bits and Pieces, published by The Economics Press, Fairfield, N.J.):

Welcome the disagreement

Remember the slogan, "When two partners always agree, one of them is not necessary." If there is some point you haven't thought about, be thankful if it is brought to your attention. Perhaps this disagreement is your opportunity to be corrected before you make a serious mistake.

Distrust your first instinctive impression

Our first natural reaction in a disagreeable situation is to be defensive. Be careful. Keep calm and watch out for your first reaction. It may be you at your worst, not your best.

Control your temper

Remember, you can measure the size of a person by what makes him or her angry.

Listen first

Give your opponents a chance to talk. Let them finish. Do not resist, defend or debate. This only raises barriers. Try to build bridges of understanding. Don't build higher barriers of misunderstanding.

Look for areas of agreement

When you have heard your opponents out, dwell first on the points and areas on which you agree.

Be honest

Look for areas where you can admit error and say so. Apologise for your mistakes. It will help disarm your opponents and reduce defensiveness.

Promise to think over your opponent's ideas and study them carefully

And mean it. Your opponents may be right. It is a lot easier at this stage to agree to think about their points than to move rapidly ahead and find yourself in a position where your opponents can say: "We tried to tell you, but you wouldn't listen."

Thank your opponents sincerely for their interest

Anyone who takes the time to disagree with you is interested in the same things you are. Think of them as people who really want to help you, and you may turn your opponents into friends.

Postpone action to give both sides time to think through the problem

Suggest that a new meeting be held later that day or the next day, when all the facts may be brought to bear. In preparation for this meeting, ask yourself some hard questions: Could my opponents be right? Partly right? Is there truth or merit in their position or argument? Is my reaction one that will relieve the problem, or will it just relieve any frustration? Will my reaction drive my opponents further away or draw them closer to me? Will my reaction elevate the estimation good people have of me? Will I win or lose? What price will I have to pay if I win? If I am quiet about it, will the disagreement blow over? Is this difficult situation an opportunity for me?

The only way to get the best of an argument is to avoid it.