As I am recruiting new people to join FIRST, I often hear “I’d love to, but I don’t have the time.”
Everyone has the same amount of time, roughly 8,760 hours every year. Be in control of your own schedule, if you never “don’t have time” for something in relation to someone else, you just value other activities differently.
I have kept accurate records of time spent at work, and time spent volunteering since graduating college in August of 2009, and I thought I’d share how I reflect on life. This is something I encourage everyone to do at some point, look back and think to yourself are you spending too much in some areas, and too little in others?
from August 17, 2009 (First day of work) through Dec 16, 2012 (last day of accounting calendar)
Hours working: 7,656
Hours Volunteering: 1,743
(volunteering includes multiple activities, but 95% of which is FIRST related)
Feel free to add a caption to what the heck I was doing with my life during the 3 months I didn’t do anything to benefit the community.
I think you spent those three months catching up on sleep
Great information, Barry! What’s the reason for all three categories spiking (excluding the build season spikes) at the same times? Or am I just reading the graphs wrong?
If you look at the categories, many times “Paid work” will spike, but the others will remain relatively constant. However, since the graph is additive , it appears like all 3 spike. Instead of looking at the absolute value for each color at any point, look at the delta between its top and bottom.
Hit the nail on the head here. I could normalize this graph a by making it weekly instead of monthly. Some months have 5 weeks, while others have 4, which explains the smaller spikes.
How about normalizing it as a % of the total time available in that month? That will also have the added benefit of showing roughly what % of your time is still free (aka used for sleeping!) during the year, and it’s relatively simple to “do the math” to figure out about how much time per day is being spent in each activity each month.
What Barry’s really saying is that he wishes he could monetize the time spent volunteering so he could quit his day job
I feel your pain with the Master’s Degree. There’s nothing more depressing than being in your hotel room at Champs doing a take-home final while everyone else is out socializing in the evenings.
I really admire you taking the time to document your hours for that period of time, but I honestly don’t want to know the amount of time I spend working with teams and volunteering.
I think my signature makes that much easier. Finding me is pretty easy, go to an FTC or FRC competition between December-March in Florida, and there is a high probability that I’m there.
Everyone takes in the same information differently, and shaping graphs different ways can present a whole new set of conclusions. I beleive Karabou would have interpretted a normal line graph best, and Jon here would respond best to percentages instead of total hours. *(http://www.chiefdelphi.com/media/papers/2756?), and included these graphs.
I wasn’t expecting anyone to actually be interested in this information, but I’m glad to see others are. Thanks for posting feeback!
…and I believe those three months were when I went on sobatical to travel on a wild safari/archeological excavation of the ancient remains of the only known all ninja civilation, often thought to be just a ghostown until the city was left in ruins by the Great Pirate Uprising.*
Gotcha. Looking at it again, that’s definitely apparent. I may have been a little tired/exhausted/out of it when I checked this out initially last night…
