The behavior I wanted to improve was “doing something for myself” outside of work and school, which I often feel pretty empty without doing. I counted reading and crocheting in this category. To observe this, I logged my behavior in 30-minute time intervals over the past 5 days.
Experience: To make it more understandable at a glance, I color-coded my behaviors below, noting when I “did something for myself”, had “social time”, did “school or work related” activities, or took time to “rest”, as shown in the chart below.
What stands out to me is that I spent significant time doing things for myself, even on days where I had lots of work to do (though to a lesser degree). I think this can be mostly attributed to the fact that this was a rainy weekend, after a very chill first week, and without my best-friend-roomie living in my apartment anymore (I miss her). I seem to spend much more time on myself than I thought– which I am happy about and proud of.
Connection Circle: My connection circle below helped me to understand the various activities I associate with work and school, which often affects the activities that I get to do (or not do) for myself. For example, while social plans increase inspiration, they don’t help me actually take action on that inspiration. I’ve learned that for me, doing things by myself also might mean actually being by myself. I have learned to love being alone.
While I like being alone, I like to do my tasks altogether– for example, I always read while I eat, or crochet in between laundry batches. Though I like to do things for myself, I also like knowing that my time is being spent wisely– but this only goes for when I’m actually reading or crocheting, since I do spend a significant amount of time on my phone.
One thing that this chart does not show is that sometimes, listening to music (another activity that feels like me-time) is sometimes a huge distraction while reading or crocheting. I do it often, but I also take breaks from it. While doing all these things on their own mean a lot to me and my mental well-being, I seem to be overwhelming myself by trying to do them all at once. I wonder how I can find balance in that while not hyperfocusing on only one action at a time.
Fishbone Diagram: This gives more insight into the state of my environment (much dependent on the roommate and weather situation described above) as well as my emotional state (I was on my period). An increase in reading and crocheting was accompanied by what I call my “hermit vibe”, where all I wanted to do this weekend was sleep and talk to no one else. It also helped that I am a yarn hoarder and have an ipad, making all the materials I needed to indulge my me-time very accessible.
What I’d do differently: Next time, I’d be interested in tracking not only my actions, but also the location of them as well as other actions or thought threads I may be having while performing them– in mapping, I only recalled this data instead of referring to documentation. I find my associated environments and habits, such as listening to music or my apartment itself, to have seemingly strong effects on my behavior, and I would like to understand them deeper 🙂
