A Year in Time: My 2024 Google Calendar Analysis

Why Analyze My Calendar?

I’m doing this for three reasons:

1. I have a thing for measurement and data visualization.
2. It’s Spring break 2025, making it a perfect time to reflect on how I spent my time in 2024.
3. I’m (hopefully) graduating from my PhD at the end of this summer, and I want to understand how I allocated my time during my PhD – both as a personal retrospective and as a baseline for my future self.

Tracking Daily Activities with Google Calendar

Usually, at the start of each week, I lay out the tasks I think I’ll need to tackle. Though, unsurprisingly, research is nearly impossible to timebox accurately, so I adjust my tasks as I go along. Even when things don’t go as planned, having a structured outline helps me stay on track and keeps me from spending entire days lying in bed.

I use four major categories of events in my Google Calendar:

• ⬤ Important and Urgent – Tasks that require immediate attention, such as projects, meetings, interviews,or deadlines.
• ⬤ Important and Not Urgent – Long-term projects, deep work, and research that impact my goals but don’t have immediate deadlines.
• ⬤ Not Important and Urgent – Tasks that feel time-sensitive but aren’t truly meaningful, like administrative work, responding to emails, job applications, and Leetcode.
• ⬤ Not Important and Not Urgent – Activities that are neither urgent nor that important, such as housework, grocery shopping, low-priority work stuff, and Duolingo.

In addition to these main categories, I also track specific event types:

• ⬤ Life Events – I wanted to use this as major personal milestones. However, it turned out to be only used for medical appointments and stuff like that.
• ⬤ Fun Stuff – Leisure activities, hobbies, and planned social time.
• ⬤ Family – Dedicated time spent with family members.
• ⬤ Exercise – Workouts and other physical activities.

A Year in Time: Overview

Here’s a breakdown of how I spent my time in 2024, based on my Google Calendar data. Assuming 48 work weeks (I took 2 weeks off in June and 2 weeks off in December), the weekly averages are as follows:

• ⬤ Important and Urgent: 554 hours (~11.5 hours per week).
• ⬤ Important and Not Urgent: 770.7 hours (~16.1 hours per week).
• ⬤ Not Important and Urgent: 297 hours (~6.2 hours per week).

• ⬤ Not Important and Not Urgent: 287 hours (~6 hours per week).

• ⬤ Life Events: 97.6 hours (~2 hours per week).
• ⬤ Fun Stuff: 53.8 hours (~1.1 hours per week).
• ⬤ Family: 50.5 hours (~1.1 hours per week).
• ⬤ Exercise: 86.4 hours (~1.8 hours per week).

This adds up to a total of 2,206 hours. However, some events overlap. For example, a significant portion of the 93.6 hours categorized as “⬤ Life Events” was spent on (cat) allergy shots. During the observation period after each shot, I often used the time to do Duolingo or catch up on emails. After accounting for these overlaps, the actual time spent across all events in 2024 comes to 2,109 hours.

Based on these numbers, I averaged around 40 hours per week on work-related tasks—but this estimate comes with some caveats:

1. ⬤ Overestimation – Some non-work activities, like grocery shopping and housework, are categorized under Not Important and Not Urgent, which might inflate the total hours logged.
2. ⬤ Underestimation – I don’t account for time spent commuting, setting up my workspace, getting distracted by social media, or chatting with coworkers. While this isn’t strictly an underestimation (that I only track focused work), I’m aware that in corporate jobs, time spent at work – rather than actual concentrated work time – is often what’s measured.
3. ⬤ Underestimation: – During paper crunch periods, when I’m working 12–14 hours per day, I am not bothered to update my calendar. The placeholder events I originally scheduled stay unchanged, meaning my logged work hours during these periods are likely much lower than reality.

Based on the factors above, 40 hours per week seems like a reasonable lower-bound estimate.

Trend Analysis

Monthly Work Hours Trend: ⬤ Important and Urgent, ⬤ Important and Not Urgent, ⬤ Not Important and Urgent, ⬤ Not Important and Not Urgent.

This Monthly Work Hours Trend chart above shows how my workload changed throughout 2024’s major deadlines. You can see clear spikes in work hours leading up to key deadlines: NeurIPS in May (reject), NDSS in July (reject), ICLR in September (accept), and WWW in October (accept). After each deadline, my work hours dropped for recovery. The “Not Important and Not Urgent” category stayed fairly steady, showing that some lower-priority tasks were always present.

The Terms Project

Monthly Work Hours Trend for the Terms Project

This project was submitted to NDSS 2025, got rejected, and was later accepted to WWW 2025. During submission weeks, I spent around 100 hours per month, compared to ~40 hours per month on average otherwise.

Looking back, this is probably a big underestimate – I clearly remember a two-week sprint of 12-hour days in July, which wasn’t healthy or sustainable, and I definitely could have managed my time better. But that sprint alone should have been well over 100 hours.

The ELFS Project

Monthly Work Hours Trend for the ELFS Project

The ELFS project was submitted to NeurIPS 2024, got rejected, and was later accepted to ICLR 2025. Most of its time blocks fall under “Not Important and Urgent”, not because it wasn’t urgent – I spent 175 hours per month during submission months and ~75 hours per month on average otherwise – but because it started as a side project alongside Terms and aligned with my long-term research goals.

Exercise

Weekly Hours Spent on Exercise

This graph shows my weekly exercise hours throughout the year. In 2025, I want to improve the consistency and focus on maintaining a steady routine of mixed strength training and cardio.

Fun Stuff

Weekly Hours Spent on Fun Stuff

Most of my fun time went into recording music and spending time with friends. I had two intense recording marathons in February and December. I want to do more of this in 2025.

Work Cloud

Word Cloud of My 2024 Google Calendar

The word cloud reflects key themes from my 2024 Google Calendar. The most prominent phrase, “label free”, represents the ELFS project, which focused on label-free coreset selection. We can also see smaller words like “strength training”, “allergy shot”, “leetcode”, and “interview prep” reflect other activities that took up a smaller share of my time.

Summary

Logging and analyzing data is fun! It’s always interesting to look back at my calendar and piece together forgotten moments. My Spotify Wrapped claimed I spent 744 minutes looping one song on October 17, 2024. I had no memory of this, so I checked my calendar – no events logged that day. That’s when it clicked: it was my recovery day after a paper submission, where I probably lay in bed all day playing Chinese chess. That ended up being a milestone because, by the end of that day, I decided to quit Chinese chess and I’ve been clean ever since. Hopefully, it stays that way 🤞

There’s a myth that some Ph.D. students work 996 (9 AM to 9 PM, six days a week) or even 9-11-7 (9 AM to 11 PM, seven days a week), but I’m definitely not one of them, and I plan to keep it that way. Looking at my 2024 Google Calendar data, my workload was largely dictated by paper submission deadlines. This year, I want to have a more chill and balanced research schedule. Outside of work, I want to focus more on execise rountine consistency. My fun time mostly went into music recording and social events. I want to do more of this in 2025.

Lastly, if anyone is interested in the code I used to generate these visualizations, you can find it here.