666 hours. An interval of time just under four weeks, spanning from 12/18/23 to 1/14/24. A wonderful opportunity to escape, to forget the pain and suffering and the endless grind that was my first semester at CMU. Finally, winter break was upon me.
Last month, on a cold December morning, waiting to board the bus that would turn the faded memories of my past life back into reality, there were only two things on my mind:
- Learn how to draw anime girls.
- Learn some new songs/skills on the ukulele.
Why #1? I think the ability to draw anything, especially anime girls, is an underrated skill. And it’s a worthwhile one - even if all it does is uplift a few people’s spirits when they’re drowning in a never-ending deluge of homework and midterms. Weeks prior, I experienced first-hand the power of such a drawing - the first-time bliss of seeing a cute girl materialize from nothing more than chalk lines on a blackboard. Just a glance in her direction as I was walking by would trigger pleasant feelings of comfort and warmth - Every. Single. Time. Maybe that’s just me, but that drawing made me feel just a bit better about life. A bit more hopeful. A bit more confident. When her head was erased a few weeks later by some unknown perpetrator, that blissful feeling was replaced by a sickening feeling of despair and powerlessness. Life was never quite the same afterward. Alas, one could say that it’s just a drawing. Of course it’s going to be temporary. But, somehow, the angst of seeing that drawing erased persisted, and I vowed to be able to recreate those pleasant, warm feelings one day. If I somehow obtained the ability to draw anime girls, I wouldn’t have to be dependent on the occasional drawing made by others - I’ll just do it myself. [0]
The exact board in question that inspired me to dedicate a significant number of hours to drawing. Unfortunately, no trace of the original drawing remains today. (it was in the bottom right corner) Oh look, someone drew a cat in this one.
Goal #2 has its roots from this summer, and only because my mom bought a cheap ukulele to use as a prop for some photos. Turns out, that ukulele was actually playable, and I was like, dang. It sounds kinda good. I want to actually learn some songs on this thing. And so I did. And during the first semester, I found out that I could actually perform these songs to other people, and it was quite a gratifying experience. Unfortunately, I quickly ran out of songs to play and decided that I definitely needed to increase my repertoire over break.
Let’s see how these goals turned out.
The data
Here’s everything I did in those 666 hours, grouped into what I think are the major categories of my current life. (see [1] for category explanations)
Here’s the same data in a pie chart:
Okay… It appears that I do sleep a lot. Let’s get rid of sleep then.
Drawing
Cool. So I spent more time eating than drawing. But I definitely did a lot of drawing. Realizing that I had absolutely no prior experience, I decided to go through all of the lessons and exercises in (the pirated book) Drawing on the Right Side of Your Brain, which teaches you how to “see” the world like an artist and other “fundamental” techniques. Unfortunately, I was almost done with the book when I realized that half of it was pseudoscience (you probably need both sides of your brain to draw - you can’t just “turn off” your left brain to focus on the artistic right brain) and that the other half is just half-baked drawing exercises with an appalling lack of rigorous instruction. (Although I didn’t have any artistic standards at the time, so I thought it was a decent book.) I ended up not finishing the last chapter and switched to drawabox.com (a free online drawing course) with less than two weeks of break left. So far, I think is teaching me the fundamentals of drawing lines and ellipses quite well. While doing this, I, of course, also attempted to draw anime girls. Despite spending a significant amount of time drawing, most of them are probably cursed beyond recognition - it appears that learning how to draw well takes longer than a month. Who knew?
Ellipse practice! I have a few pages of these.
This is everything I’ve drawn thus far. Note that everything is on plain old A4 paper. I’ve been mostly using 2B/4B graphite pencils and fine-liners (basically thin Sharpies) for these. (I brought this folder along with me to CMU, but I don’t think I’ll show you guys anything in here as some of it might be rather disturbing (to me and/or to you). (I… uh… ehehe~ Let’s just say my imagination’s weird. Okay, but d-don’t get the wrong idea here…) [2]
Everything else
Practicing ukulele… kind of fell off. I mean, okay, I still learned a few new strumming patterns and bits of some new songs, but it definitely wasn’t a major time-sink. To be honest, I’m not sure if I wanted it to be. I suppose when you don’t have an absolutely concrete goal in mind, striving for any sort of progress feels less motivating.
I also did a surprising amount of software dev (SD), despite having no plans to do so. I also learned how to actually use Git in three or so days of frenzied learning and stack-overflowing. [3] That’s what having a burning passion for coding gets you, eh?
Studying flashcards on Anki took very little time, even though I was reviewing the math content from the past semester every day through the hundreds of flashcards that I made. Since I actually studied during the semester (pretty much daily), the automated spaced-repetition algorithm made each day’s workload during break extremely light. (at most 30-40 reviews/day) But even then, I still remember LU decomposition, uncountable set proofs, and the reverse Euclidean algorithm as clear as day (or as clearly as I learned it, anyhow), and it’s been more than a month since the last lecture.)
This pie chart’s not perfect, but it’s not that bad. Maybe I could’ve gotten that 5.3% slice of wasted time back. Maybe I could’ve spent less time doing uncategorized well-being stuff, whatever that means. (I actually need to start categorizing things better.) Maybe I could’ve done something more useful, like picking up my competitive programming skills that have been slowly decaying for the past 1.5 years. (That’s 90% an ego thing though.)
Some more analysis
Curious as to how much time I wasted or productively made use of, I then proceeded to group all of the data above into just four categories:
- Mandatory/routine things: Exercising, task transitioning, eating food, etc. (Note that I removed sleep because that’s the one thing whose duration I can’t really control.)
- Actually productive: Anything where I did the thing that I set out to do (including socializing) OR things that are generally considered productive but unplanned, like a spontaneous 2-hour reading session in the middle of the day. [4]
- Debatable: All of the uncategorized wellbeing and misc tasks, as well as break, because how long does a break need to be before it becomes unproductive?
- Not productive: Only the wasted time category goes here
What’s interesting is that the time doing things that I wanted to do accounted for only 37.8% of the time I spent awake. I didn’t expect routine tasks to take up 1/3 of my waking hours either. Maybe I eat too slowly? Shower too much?
Also, is this 37.8% a hard limit? Will my work be forced to only take up 1/3 of the time I spend awake? Or is it just the winter-break version of me being rather lazy? It’s, indeed, far easier to waste time or lose a couple of hours in the debatable category when there’s nothing due that day. Or the next. Or the next. This pie chart could be better (routine and debatable could definitely shrink a bit), but it doesn’t totally suck either.
Things that the data missed
What these pie charts don’t tell you is how I felt in the moment. Or what thoughts I’ve had. You wouldn’t know that I became deeply infatuated with the characters in DDLC (Doki Doki Literature Club) for about a week. You wouldn’t know how I felt when my website got over 200 distinct viewers on Christmas Day just from a Hacker News comment posted by me. (It was rather underwhelming) You wouldn’t know how I felt after wasting 5 hours playing some pointless .io game. You wouldn’t know that I was briefly inspired to do a competitive programming problem (or 3) after watching two hours of top players of Osu! talking about their progress. (These people were also like 15-year-olds, but I digress.) But that’s not the point, is it? The point of these graphs is just to understand my life from a different, limited perspective in contrast to the other limited perspectives that I’ve been sharing up until now.
Actionable steps?
The entire point of any analysis is to learn from it, but I’m not sure what to take away from this. I’m now in a completely different situation with completely different obligations than those during winter break. Things will definitely be different. I’ll be forced to walk a lot more to get to classes, probably drown (again) in a deluge of assignments, and (maybe) spend more time socializing and finding a girlfriend.
So, I plan on doing mini weekly time reflections starting this Sunday (probably keeping the same categories) just to be more proactive about managing where my time is going. I have the data - I just need to understand it. A sailor armed with only a map, compass, and the stars wouldn’t only check their direction once a month, right? They’ll probably do it daily - to make small course adjustments that make a significant impact in the long run. Small actions in any field, in fact, performed consistently over days or weeks, probably take far less effort and result in a far greater impact than some Herculean effort done at the very end.
Let’s see what the future holds, and let’s analyze the heck out of it. We’re governed by the same 24 hours a day - the same pie. All that matters is how we split it.
Footnotes
[0] I can confirm I’m not a weeb - but who doesn’t like looking at cute girls? I mean, maybe if you’re a girl, but I digress. I also doubt that any girls read my blog, but I digress again.
[1] Here’s an explanation of some of the vaguer categories (anything labeled uncategorized didn’t have a sub-category, which is a problem if the primary category is too broad.)
Wellbeing - anything that’s not online and restorative for my mind/soul.
Wasted time - absolutely nothing good came out of this time block other than an overwhelming sense of guilt.
Food - food
misc (task transition) - Car rides, cleaning up desk, walking somewhere, etc.
socializing - with friends irl/virtual
finance - because I have a bank account now
Routine - “mandatory” things I do every day (showering, brushing my teeth, laundry, sleeping, etc.)
SD - software dev
[2] Future Eric here - bro what is this writing style?
[3] (git rebase ftw!) (Also, branches are just pointers) (Also, use git push —force-with-lease instead of git push —force so you don’t unexpectedly orphan other people’s commits on the branches that you’re overriding.)
[4] However, one can also say that nothing I did over winter break was productive as it probably does not help my future job or employment prospects. Uhh..