What “Overload” Looks Like: The Personal Analytics of Being Too Busy

These last few weeks have been just crazy for me. In addition to an usually busy period at the day job, with projects coming to rollout while others are just starting up, and others still need extra help, I’ve also been preparing for the seminar I gave earlier this week, reading and writing for my book review column, continuing to work on my current novella, and, of course, doing family stuff. I have had time for almost nothing else, and when you look at the numbers, it shows.

Here is what a fairly typical week of walking looks like for me:

You can see that on most days, I hit my goal of 15,000 steps (about 7.5 miles) each day. More often than not, I exceed it. The last few weeks, however, I’ve just been too busy to take the time to walk. My weeks have looked more like this:

Here, on the majority of the days, I barely hit 5,000 steps, less than a third of what I aim for. Granted, the cold weather has played a factor, but it was cold today and still managed over 17,000 steps. The bigger factor has been being so busy!

Another way to see this is to look at my fiction writing. Here is a rolling 7-day average of my fiction writing over the last 30 days:

The red line represents my daily goal (currently 700 words/day). For the first time in a long time, my 7-day moving average has fallen below my daily goal. You can see that this busy phase really took off around January 4th, and has just continued to hammer me. That said, I still have managed to write every day, even if it is less. As of today, I’ve written for 193 consecutive days, and 336 out of the last 338 days. But these last few weeks, the daily totals have been dropping–not because I don’t have the desire, but because I don’t have the time.

So where is all of the time going? Earlier this month, I started using RescueTime, which is about the best tool I could find for tracking your time on the computer in great detail without any effort on your part. According to RescueTime, I logged over 70 hours on computers last week:

The red represents my non-productive time, but more than 69% of my time was in highly productive work–you can see the breakdown for yourself. (RescueTime goes into far more detail, but there’s no need to do so here.)

This week is looking very much the same as last, but I think things are finally starting to ease up. Also, I’m beginning to say “no” to some things. (I was asked to do a radio interview this evening, but I said no, simply because I didn’t need the added stress.)

I find it interesting to bring all of this data and see what the picture looks like when I feel overwhelmed. In a way, I can extract some data from all of these numbers and build a kind of early-warning system that alerts me when things are moving in this direction again–and perhaps that will help me to better identify when to slow down a little bit sooner.

(P.S.: I do plan to write a more extensive post on RescueTime, which is amazing, but: I’m kinda busy right now.)