• “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.

Sadly, 2022 was so intense that this activity could not be pursued beyond August.

The code for this project is available here. To have some fun with it, I explored matter.js in this project to treat each activity in a day as a weighted-box.