[OC] I am a PhD student at MIT, and I’ve tracked every “productive” activity I’ve done since 2019–here are some of my stats

I started using Toggl to track my activity in 2019, but didn't start using it for everything until 2020, the year I graduated high school. The second image is an example of what the data itself looks like–I only track things if I am actively working on them, i.e. actively sitting at my computer reading something, writing code, taking notes, etc. The third image is a spreadsheet I made of the time spent in each of my undergraduate classes at UMich, and how I performed in them.

2025 has been my most productive year so far, averaging 6.22 hours of active work per day. At the start of the year, I started to really enjoy my research project, which obviously helped motivate me to work more. At the same time, I also became a lot more determined to aim for a good tenure-track job, which would require me to have a substantial body of work in my PhD, thus another motivation to work more.

I have a really terrible sleep schedule (as should be obvious by images 4-5), but I work every day to make up for it (I've only taken 2 days off in the past 8 months, including weekends). You'll also notice I only wake up at 9 AM less then 20% of weekdays, which is just because I have a 9AM research subgroup meeting every Tuesday. Also, in image 4, you can see that my sleep schedule completely devolved in 2020 due to COVID, where I am only about 2x more likely to be working at 4 PM as I am likely to be working anytime from 2 AM to 6 AM. Image 2 shows an example of what this looked like in pracitice. Essentially, if I don't have any regular meetings at normal times, I default to a ~28 hour sleep schedule that slowly rotates through the day over the course of a few weeks.

I originally posted this last week on Friday, unaware of rule 9 (personal data posts are only permissible on Mondays), and it was taken down within an hour. I fixed the plots up a bit before reposting, but I thought I should also add some of the common questions from the original post:

"How much time did this take you?"

The plots themselves + writing the initial post took ~3.3 hours, but obviously the data collection was the primary time sink. I only actually spend about 2 minutes every day starting and stopping the timers, so the total time would probably be a bit less than 70 hours.

Why?

In high school, I struggled a lot with procrastination, time-tracking was just a way to hold myself accountable and make sure I'm consistently making progress on my work. I was initially inspired by CGP Grey's old podcast Cortex in 2018, and I've been doing it ever since. There were a lot of concerns about my mental health in the first post, so I wanted to add here that I'm doing relatively ok. I have a lot of freedom in my current research, so I only really work on things I am personally motivated to work on, which I think helps a lot.