574 days of time diaries

I have published a log of all of my activities between October 20, 2002, and May 15, 2004, on the 574 days of time diaries web page. The page has links to the raw data and some summary tools I wrote along with an online summary generator that you can use to see where my time was spent for a given set of days. The main reason for publishing this information is so that researchers can use the data in studies that require time diaries or similar types of information. For more details, see the web page.

2 Responses to “574 days of time diaries”


  • That’s a lot of days of diaries. How much time a day do you think you spent just typing in descriptions? Did you create a program to log the times or was it a notepad thing?

  • I don’t know for sure how long it took, but I can give you an estimate. Assuming I typed 75 words per minute on average and every 5 characters is a word, it would take 16.13 minutes per day to type the time diary, excluding the license header (this is an average over all days). The real value is probably much larger because it doesn’t take into account the time required to switch from a task to recording the time diary and then back to that task again and it also assumes no thinking time was required to determine what to write for a specific entry. So I would say at least 30 minutes per day was spent recording the notes.

    I did not create a program to log the times; all information in the text files (excluding the license header) was typed directly. I started out using Notepad but then switched to KEdit and later vim when I moved to GNU/Linux.

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