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Notes -
I was tracking my daily activities quite closely this year - Simple Time Tracker (ignore the screens they show, dark version is far more visually pleasing) is one of those best-in-category things I wish I knew a good list of. I intend to continue, it's motivating and therapeutic both.
I'm at 429 hours of books for 2024, +/-13k pages, only 30 pages/hour. Far, far more than the year before - in my case at least, it came down to the combo of accessibility (god bless Anna and her archive), seamless switching to 'audiobook' with text-to-speech (Voice Aloud is awesome for books in all formats, or any text really, especially with the new Google Journey voices) and a wireless headset. Now if only I had an endless supply of genius-tier literature recommendations.
That's great! I've only ever used STT for work and travel tracking. Do you have any tips on using it for more, because I struggle to pull my phone out, open the app, and hit the button every time.
Or do you have the timer rigged to the voice recognition too?
Nothing so fancy! I did not try using triggers, holding out for AI assistants instead. By 'quite closely' I meant more that I tracked essentially every hour of the year, but making extensive use of Edit->Action->Divide functionality whenever I forget to switch activities.
I was going for detail initially, but unsurprisingly that risks burnout - I instead settled on pretty broad 'activities' that serve as baskets for everything other than distinct activities I definitely want to track - 'Sleep', 'Books', 'Anki', 'Mealprep', 'Exercise' etc. Baskets like 'Routine misc' (tasks that keep you from falling apart), 'Tasks misc' (small tasks that get you somewhere you want to be), 'Nothing' (exclusively bad, mindless web browsing goes here). I don't bother with activity tags, it's more clicks, more decisions, and rarely a tag is more justified than another activity.
It also helps the app has the widget that cuts the interaction to just Touch Widget -> Touch activity.
Working to have 'Nothing' diminish as % of total hours tracked, while remaining honest, is a nice goal, most tangible positive effect the app had for me.
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