Increase productivity, reduce Youtube

Looking back over the past 30 days, there have definitely been days where I slacked off more than I would’ve liked. But overall I’ve noticed a trend that I’ve gotten better at being conscious about where I spend my time. Not just mindlessly going to Youtube to waste an hour looking at random videos, but being more thoughtful of where I go and what I spend my time on.

Ultimately that was my goal, so I think I definitely succeeded at that, even if I wasn’t able to check off every day with a green status. Now the goal is to keep this habit going and become a more productive human overall. If you’re still with me on this, thanks for reading and keeping up with my updates. Until next time!

So, it’s been a while since I’ve made an update. For various reasons. I had some days where I didn’t feel as mentally energized and spent quite a bit of time on Youtube (as shown in the stats below) and I’ve been putting a lot of time into other projects as well. Overall I’m still quite happy just by becoming more aware of the time I spend on the internet and where I do it. After looking at the data though, I did find it interesting to see that Youtube is still the place I tend to spend most of my active minutes online. In the end though, relaxation is also important, so it’s not that I feel the need to change that habit entirely. Just as long as it doesn’t get in the way of me being productive.

Last weekend was the first time I went over my goal amount of time on Youtube. Quite a bit as well, compared to the other days, but it wasn’t just for no reason. I had been watching some tutorial videos for learning guitar and actually got quite excited to learn more. So I spent some time researching and diving deeper into various videos late at night, hence the high numbers. Still going to mark it as a “not achieved my goal”, but at least it wasn’t all wasted time.

The past few days I noticed that the tracker doesn’t work as well as I hoped it would. In that it doesn’t actually seem to track while a video is playing, if you don’t have that tab also focused. In the settings, you could give it permission to look more closely at Youtube and Netflix, for that exact issue, but that sadly hasn’t seemed to help much.

So in an effort to get a more accurate time estimation, I tried to keep the tab active when I was watching something. That definitely has pushed some of my later days up a bit, so I’ll try to keep that going in the future. In the last day of this update, I did spend about 30 minutes of that time watching an educational video for my guitar learning project, so even though it got close to the limit, it’s not all wasted.

I’ve also included the most visited website on each day, in an effort to prevent me from slacking off on a different website (looking at you Netflix). Especially at the beginning I had a habit of doing this, but recently that has switched to using Notion a lot for my gamedev project. Lastly I decided to invert the ordering of the days, so the most recent ones are at the top, instead of at the bottom. I feel this helps readability, so if you’re a bit confused, that’s what happened.

I spent some time away from home and from my computer this weekend, as I went to visit family. So my statistics for those days don’t entirely reflect an increase in productivity, but I’ll still count them as a win nonetheless. Overall I am noticing that I spend more time on my project and when I do want some entertainment, I will either watch something more worthwhile or actively go to seek time on Youtube. I think this active decision making is definitely something I want to continue to push for, so I’m happy with the results so far.

I’ve been very conscious of my time being recorded, so I’ve only been visiting Youtube when I really, actively wanted to relax a bit with some videos. Previously I would just instinctively browse there and start watching random stuff. So far this project has had the desired effect of really cutting down on that habit, so I’m very happy to see that. It’s even worked so well that in the first 2 days combined I still stayed under my daily limit for this week.