“Ha, I have to write about my media consumption for last week? Big Deal, I know what I spend my time on.” My impression went roughly in this line when I found out that I had to embark on this crazy self-monitoring endeavor. Little did I know that self-monitoring in this digital age can be strangely cathartic.

My journey started with installing RescueTime in my borrowed MacBook Pro. First warning sign came to me when RescueTime asked me, rather incredulously, if I was in my senses when I marked News and Opinion category as productive. “Really? Most people mark it as distracting” was the website’s wisdom. But what would an impersonal website know about our priorities, we know better right? But the power of perceived monitoring became apparent when I started navigating through my digital life.

Here are some of the insights I got from my three-day digital surveillance: I may have been devouring media, both traditional and social, in my earlier life as a journalist, but as a grad student for last two years, my media consumption went downhill and I may have retracted into my metaphorical cave filled with library books and articles. A.T. Mahan, Halford Mackinder, and other luminaries took the place of Media glitterati in my life. Consequently, the most amount of time I spend either online or offline is devoted to these readings. But self-monitoring proved that this could be a far cry from the truth. I do spend a fair amount of resources (both data and battery power) on both ‘productive activities like checking news sites and ‘distracting’ activities like listening to online music (we certainly have to be current with the Grammys right?) or checking TweetDeck ever-so-often.

It was revealing to me that when time became a precious commodity, Facebook quickly went into the back-burner but twitter remained in the focus. Another information I found about my browsing habits is that I tend to hop from one website to another. I start off with an interesting tweet or article and start reading all the related stories or the hyperlinks present in the stories. Hyperlinks can be distracting, and addictive as well…

While it was interesting to see that I was following a pattern and unknowingly was being led from one article to another, the most interesting aspect I found is the time slots that I am online.

I tend to squeeze my Digital time between the classes and other sacred Grad School rituals, like realtime socialization. While this pattern is most visible during the weekdays, I do operate on identifiable time slots during the weekends as well.

Before the start of monitoring I was of the impression that I was doing a lot of work and that as a grad student, I was under enough workload. It was only after I started monitoring my own activity that I realized there is always enough time, we just need to look deeper into our own time consumption.