Zivot User Guide

"Zivot" is the Croatian word for "life."

In Croatian, the word is spelled with a special "z" with an accent over it, like this:

Ž

The "z" with an accent sounds like "zh," so in Croatian the word is pronounced "zhee-vote," but anglicized it's just "zivot."

Zivot is the time of your life.

1. Getting started

Initially, you should choose just one activity and get used to logging your sessions. It's best to choose as your first activity one that is relatively easy to record, for which there typically are not a large number of intrusions or interruptions, and which you already tend to do in significant blocks of time. This will keep things simple and easy for you, and thus make it easy to build the habit of logging your sessions.

2. There is no such thing as "multi-tasking"

You may or may not be one of those people with the delusion that they are able to "multi-task" important activities. For truly important activities, there is no such thing as multi-tasking. There is only doing a number of things badly or sub-optimally while wasting time and attention and effort switching between them. If you still think you are able to "multi-task," just remember how you felt the last time you needed someone's full attention, but they were doodling on their phone while talking to you. Do you have fond memories of that conversation? Do you think that person was effectively "multi-tasking?"

3. Early discoveries, and suggested responses

In all likelihood, you will quickly discover just how fragmented your use of time is in general. You probably already knew it was fragmented, but when you begin to actually log activity sessions and view the results, you may be in for a shock. Your response should be to make a strong effort to establish larger blocks of time dedicated to only one activity.

Another discovery you will probably make is that a whole lot of your use of time is rather haphazard. When you begin asking yourself seriously how many hours in the past week or month you can't even account for, you may find yourself becoming much more deliberate in your use of time. You may also find that your tolerance for meangingless use of time decreases. Our suggested response is to not become infliexible about this, but to understand that this elevated consciousness is actually about making meaningful choices. The elevated consciousness is a pathway to deeper meaning.

4. Avoid the temptation to start logging every damn thing in your life

Once you get used to applying the Zivot effectively, you may begin to feel a surge of power and control, as well as curiosity. You may feel tempted to add a whole bunch of new activityies that aren't truly MVA's, in a misguided effort to measure every damn thing in your life. Don't do it. It's crazy. We know, because we've tried it.

5. Have fun with this

Our own experience with Zivot has been great fun. It's been a blast gaining more control over our time, and making discoveries about the results of spending our time in different ways. Zivot has given us a deep sense of control over our larger choices in life. Most of all it has been deeply satisfying to make the choice to imagine new and better activities to choose to engage in. We love the accuracy of the mirror that is held up to us. Sometimes we don't like what we see in that mirror, but the mirror that is Zivot helps us make adjustments, gain further control of our lives and make even better, more courageous choices.

1. Maximizing the Most Valuable Activities

What are the most valuable activities in your life? Why are those activities valuable? Why are those activities more valuable than other activities? These answers will be different for each person. We encourage you to find your own answers to those questions, and then make sure your use of time corresponds to your answers.

2. Minimizing the Least Valuable Activities

We also encourage you to at least once use Zivot in reverse, by logging how much time you're wasting on a "least valuable activity," such as watching television, or doodling on social media. The horror you experience from the first set of results will go a long way toward changing your bad habits.

3. Staying on track

Say you'd like to read more, in order to expand your mind, or create new professional opportunities, or just for the pleasure of learning about a subject. If you commit to reading a certain number of hours per week or per month, Zivot can keep you informed, in precise numeric terms and for any time period, on how close you are to meeting your goal. Zivot can even send you alerts, if you'd like, if you are slipping behind in your goal.

4. Logging hours toward a goal

To attain certain goals, you need to put in a certain number of hours. Let's say you'd like to learn a new language for travel, and you plan to put in 100 hours toward learning that language. Zivot can easily provide you with an ongoing tally of how much time you've put in toward your goal, and a countdown of how much time you still have to put in.

5. Fitness

A simple but important example is keeping track of how much exercise you are getting, and how many times you are exercising in a given period. Zivot can keep track of exactly how often you exercise, and for exactly how long. Not only that, but Zivot will be able to show you, in a graphic display, how much the duration and frequency of your exercise sessions are changing over time. You can also easily include notes on your sessions, such as the form of exercise. In addition, you can rate your sessions, to see whether your performance is going up or down.

Time is a relentless, implacable force that only surges forward, regardless of your wishes or your will. Thus, time itself cannot be managed.

Self-management

What is referred to as "time management" is actually management of your self: your behavior, your emotions, your consistency of effort, your degree of accuracy in judgments and estimates. All of this in turn depends on your level of self-knowlege, your honesty with yourself, your level of discipline and even your level of wisdom.

What we advocate

The process we advocate here at Zivot is for you to measure time accurately in relation to your behavior, learn from the results, and then make adjustments both large and small according to those results.

The goal is not to "manage time." The goal is to generate accurate information that clearly suggests ways you should change. The goal is positive change: productive, helpful, meaningful change—change you can be proud of.

You may think that you already know the answer to that question, and of course only you can ultimately answer it about yourself and your own life, but let's dig a little deeper.

Our first question:

Are there activities that are more valuable than anything you are doing right now, but that have never occurred to you?

Isn't it possible, even likely, that there is at least one activity that would be tremendously valuable for you and for your life, but that has never entered your mind? What could that activity possibly be? We leave it to you to discover.

Our second question:

Have you identified those activities in your own life that have the greatest positive effect for the least amount of time spent?

Those are the activities that have the most "leverage," the most "bang for the buck." What are those activities in your own life? Again, we leave it to you to discover.

Our final question:

Do you have an accurate assessment of how much time you are spending on useful versus useless activities?

Use Zivot to find out.

Some of us have more of them than others, and some of us indulge those we have far more than others, but all of us have them: Least Valuable Activities.

Each person has their own

One person might spend hours every day watching televion, to no point at all. Another person might pour many hours down the drain every week "keeping up" with social media. Your "smart" phone may be making you truly stupid through your checking it dozens of time per day—for what exactly?—wasting huge amounts of time in the aggregate. There are people who spend a great deal of time arguing, but what does that accomplish exactly, other than alienation and loss of opportunity? So we ask you, in all seriousness:

What are the least valuable activities in your life, and how much time are you wasting on them?

For most people, a few answers will leap to mind, perhaps with some embarassment. Despite the possible embarassment, please do make as accurate an estimate as you can of how much time you waste in a typical week on all your Least Valuable Activities. The good news is that LVA's tend to naturally decrease with an increase in awareness of them. The bad news is that your estimate of the time you waste is probably way on the low side.

A curious corollary

A curious corollary to all this is that in some cases what appear to be LVA's actually turn out to be MVA's in disguise. For instance, you might think that "doing nothing" is the all time Least Valuable Activity, but in many cases "doing nothing" is actually a way to free your mind, to allow new ideas and perceptions to emerge, and to gain perspective on your life.

In a similar way, many supposed MVA's are actually LVA's in disguise. Constantly being "busy" with things that don't actually matter is, for us, the worst LVA of all.

The question again

The question is for you to answer in your own way, given who you are and what matters to you, but we ask you again:

What are the least valuable activities in your life, and how much time are you wasting on them?

For most people, it's easy to identify a few "most valuable activities." The specifics will of course differ from person to person, but there are some common answers. Yet answering the question "What activities in my life are most valuable?" is more challenging than it seems at first, if you choose to go a bit deeper.

Question 1

What about activities that are profoundly valuable, but that you resist? All the value of the activity is lost if you don't let go of your resistance.

Question 2

What about activities that have a big payoff, but are not at all urgent? All the value of the activity is lost if you never get around to doing it.

Go deeper

When most people think about the most valuable activities in their life, the only activities that come to mind are the ones they are already doing, or already know about. But what about activities that are of immense value, but that you've never heard of, and have never occurred to you? What if an activity you've never even thought of is far more valuable than anything you're doing right now?

Go even deeper

When most people think about valuable activities, they think of external results: situations, opportunities, money, advantages. But what about activities whose deep value is in how the activity changes you for the better? What about activities that expand your capabilities, epxpand your mind, expand your perceptions? What if those are the most valuable activities of all?

The crucial question

So the crucial question becomes "How else you could spend your time, and how might doing so not only change your life for the better, but also change you for the better?"

You can add entries to Zivot by just talking into your phone. Select the text box, then select the microphone icon, and begin speaking. What you say will be automatically transcribed into the text box.

Later you can view these notes, print them out, and even search all of your notes to find anything you entered.

Facebook is about wasting time.

Zivot is about getting important things done.

Facebook is about going into a trance.

Zivot is about being conscious and deliberate.

Facebook is about getting you to look at ads.

Zivot is about you, and your life.

My name is Firinn Taisdeal, and I invented Zivot. For years I had observed a number of phenomena regarding the way people relate to time:

• Most people waste a huge proportion of their time.
• Most people have no accurate assessment of how much time they are wasting.
• Most people's estimates of the time they spend on various activities are radically inaccurate.
• Many people claim to want to make certain changes in their life, but then not only don't put in the time required to make those changes, but have no measurements at all of how much time they are applying toward the changes they claim they want to make.
• Most people remain vague about what they are doing, as well as vague about why they are doing what they are doing.
• Most people have never applied their intelligence or their imagination to the matter of how spending time in particular ways affects the course of their life.
• Many people struggle with the fragmentation of their time, but fail to do anything effective to reduce that fragmentation.

The first experiments

I also observed that all of the above critique applied to me as well. As a matter of both integrity and curiosity, I began keeping track of exactly how much time I was spending on different activitives, which represented different aspects of my life, and my values. I used timers of various kinds, and entered the information into a spreadsheet over the course of several months.

The first results

The first results were a severe shock. Immediately, it was absolutely clear that the way I was spending my time did not correspond to my values, and would not result in the changes I wanted to make in my life. This much was obvious, purely from the numbers calculated by the spreadsheet. However, this shock and the clarity of conclusions presented by the numbers failed to affect my behavior. This lack of the desired change in my behavior became very frustrating for me.

Data science to the rescue

A the same time, I was studying Data Science and Data Science Visualization, and had become fascinated by the psychological and emotional effects of certain visualizations of data. I turned the data from my spreadsheet into visualizations: pie charts, scatter plots, trend lines. That's when the magic began.

Big changes

Within days, my behavior began to change for the better. The shamefully small slice of the pie chart that represented exercise began to grow wider, and I felt better and had more energy because of it. The big, fat slices that represented unimportant matters began to shrink. The sadly slender slices that represented what I truly cared about began to grow larger, and become more robust and stable. I was thrilled and proud and happy about this progress.

Zivot is born

I knew that these same postive effects would be experienced by other people, so I wanted to share. Thus Zivot was born, after many hours of reflection, programming and testing. I sincerely hope that Zivot will help you as well: to accomplish what you want to accomplish, to change what you want to change, to become what you want to become.