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Do you know how long you actually study/stay productive in a day or in a week? How do you spend your time? Maybe you overestimate the amount of work you are putting in. In that case, time to measure!
After all, "what gets measured gets improved", as Robin S. Sharma said. It is certainly true that by measuring your time, at least in the beginning, you will get a much better picture of what it feels like to put in enough work to have a consistently high productivity level to reach or even surpass your goals.
I have been using a certain app called Forest which I have been using since November 2018. As you can see in the screenshots below, I had logded in about 833 hours of productivity time in 2019! I mean who would have thought?
Without tracking, you simply would have no idea. Considering the fact that there are holidays and whatnot in a year, it's not too bad. I don't want to brag or anything, hell, that might be nothing compared to some other productivity beast, but just seeing this number is fascinating to me.
Probably more insightful though are the more short-term data like per day/week/month. As you can tell there is a stark difference between February 2020 and April 2020. I had a record-high in February. Why is that? The answer is I was studying for all the exams that were coming up! Meanwhile, April seems relatively relaxed since the semester had not even started until its second half.
In any case, through this tracking you can review your performance, see whether anything is going badly and try to imrove.
The tracking is actually not even the main feature, at its core, the app is a so-called Pomodoro-Timer. If you don't know already, the Pomodoro technique is about working with intense focus and without distraction for 25 minutes., followed by a 5-min break. And then you repeat this.
Before any session you can write what you are working on and tag a category, so in the end you can see your tags distribution. As the app is about you planting trees that you can unlock, the favorite tree species at the time is listed as well.
By the way, you can plant a real tree too! You just need to do your work and earn virtual coins, with enough you can plant real trees, as I did.
There are other features still, but that would take too long. Ultimately, the app has been an enriching experience for me, maybe you could give it a try :)
By the way, they also have a pretty adorable Personality/Focus Type Test, mine is below. Tell me what you got if you tried: https://forest-mt.seekrtech.com
#notsponsored xD
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