What I learned reviewing my internet activity for 9 months?
Tags: productivity, programming, showdev
Published: 2022-08-24 15:37:39

Have you ever had a feeling that time flies fast?

I’ve always been wondering how people cope with it. Here’s few creative ways I discovered on the web:

* writing a diary - [**What I Learned from Documenting My Life for 365 Days**](https://medium.com/@Bradford_Wolf/what-i-learned-from-documenting-my-life-for-365-days-a78da397eb01)

* shooting 1 second of video each day, which adds up to 1 hour for a decade of living
{% embed https://youtu.be/7uN4I1wEOXE %}
* creating a gif at the end of each day - [**I’ve been documenting my life through gifs for the past year.**](https://medium.com/@jon/i-ve-been-documenting-my-life-through-gifs-for-the-past-year-bfe23c8a2eef)

But back then, at Feb. 2018, I didn’t know someone was doing that already, I just had this idea to document small fraction of my life — being online, there were no posts about it, no publicity.

We all procrastinate to some extent. Whether it’s okay to set aside time for yourself to just do nothing, but when in the middle of the work all of sudden you find yourself watching YouTube video, something went wrong.

![My brain has too many tabs open](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/2000/1*MFIMdeSChp7OQsU3ejthzA.jpeg)

To reduce procrastination and bring awareness to working style, goal setting and general online behavior I decided to do this experiment.

## Quick Overview

At early Feb. 2018 I set up a system to capture screen every minute my laptop was functioning. **Every. Single. Minute.**

I didn’t set any expectations for myself, no rules. Otherwise it might’ve affected the reality — truth that I wanted to unveil.

Since I was using laptop most of the time, and less smartphone I consider the results pretty accurate.

## **How did I do it technically?**

Using Lubuntu 16.05 LTS at a time, there wasn’t much to be done — write a Bash script and add it as a cron job.

Then using Python along with ffmpeg I created another script to make a video out of screenshots. Whenever I needed to render a video, just used Python script with corresponding date range.

## Some measurements

* Average screenshot size — 600 kB

* video from Feb. 20, 2018 to 31 Mar. 2018 was 11m 5s

* 96 678 shots at the end, which represents 96 678 minutes of recorded screen time. 67 days 3 hours 18 minutes with 24h/day usage

* or 134 days 6 hours 36 minutes if 12h/day

* or 268 days 13 hours 12 minutes if 6h/day, roughly meaning 9 months of your computer — life recorded.

* How much data do we collect per day( considering 6h laptop usage)?

600 kB * 6 * 60 = 216000 kB ~ **216 MB**

Which per year makes 216 MB * 365.25 ~ **78.8 GB**

* I collected around **59.8 GB** of data which is **75.8%** of yearly amount - roughly 9 months.

* A final video of the year would be **1h 7m 8s** long

## What I learned from the journey?

### As a human being

* your interests might change, but the pattern how you learn something new persists

* your Google queries reveal a lot about you

* It’s absolutely exciting experience to watch an overview-video about your online activities, even if it’s just 1 month. In 11 minutes you see month-summary of work, study, interests which reveals whether you’re headed in the direction of your dreams or you’re just a ship floating in the ocean of life, obeying every sudden gust of wind

**Crucial discovery** for me was:

* It doesn’t matter how big of a dream you have, you won’t achieve a thing without **making each day count**, steadily executing small steps towards the goal.

There’s a remarkable **Creed** movie quote: **One step at a time. One punch at a time. One round at a time.**

### As a software engineer

* if you download 1 kB text file and get an error it’s probably because your script used up too much space and it’s time to move the screenshots to other partition😐

* not much space needed to sustain this style of self surveillance

* Don’t create files with filename like *15th of April 2018 15:34:00.png , *transfer them from Linux machine to external HDD, and then plug it into the Windows 10 machine. Windows apparently doesn’t know how to deal with filenames that contain a semicolon. And from Windows you cannot delete, cut or rename such file.
Of course, there’s chkdsk for renaming all your files to Windows-compatible format, but when you’ve got 96 786 of files, that takes quite ….. a ….. while …..

Was this whole experience beneficial? Yes, undoubtedly. I don’t regret spending time doing this research on myself.

But now, it’s time to close this chapter of my story and move forward along with gained knowledge.

## Other videos of people documenting their life
{% embed https://youtu.be/59bWyoNq904  %}
{% embed https://youtu.be/Ahwpzi4MLZs  %}
{% embed https://youtu.be/tZW--fcdK-4  %}