• “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”

Thought

In 2022, influenced by Annie Dillard’s eloquent quote, I sought a way to keep track of how I spend my life. There were 6 distinct buckets that summed up my life:

1. Work [my full time job]
2. Teaching [my part-time job]
3. Creative Practice
4. People [friends, family & social obligations]
5. Health [physical exercise]
6. Archiving [website & writing activities]

The primary goal was to achieve a balance between days spent in the six buckets. Days, not time; since some buckets (such as working out) require less time than others (my full-time job). At the end of a month (and subsequently my life), if my time was spent equally amongst the six buckets, could I say that I spent my days well?

I started out in August 2022 by sticking a piece of paper on my front door. Each day was divided into 6 cells, with each cell being coloured in at the end of the day if I spent any time in that bucket.

2022 was so intense that this activity could not be pursued beyond August. However, in 2023, I have decided to pursue this for the entire year. All the raw data is available on Google Sheets and a p5.js sketch is used to visualise it.

The code is available here. To have some fun with it, I explored matter.js in this project to treat each day as an active particle.