In a number of recent conversations, a lot of people claim that they don't have the time to focus on investing. It's easier to get someone to do it for them. I challenged this somewhat, respecting family life, children, hobbies and the likes, but let's be real, investing is crucial for retirement so we need to make time. This got me thinking about ways to analyse the time we spend online to see if there is perhaps opportunity to create more time to focus on investing, and I've come up with something very interesting that I'd like to share with you - let's analyse our browser usage.
Most people who work at a computer spend a considerable amount of time in the likes of Google Chrome, whether it's checking email, watching YouTube, reading news and so forth. Because of this, it presents us with a great deal of data that we can use to analyse how we spend our time and that's where the idea came from. This isn't rocket science, and it doesn't take software usage into account but it's a good start for anyone who spends a lot of time in a browser.
First thing is to download a Chrome extension called, "Export History / Chrome History Manager". Here are the steps:
This CSV file will contain the following information:
Once you've created your CSV file, put it somewhere easy to grab it, for the next step.
Now, open up ChatGPT or whichever LLM you use and get ready to upload it, along with a prompt along these lines:
Analyse the attached CSV file, and tell me what times of the day I am in "brain rot" mode when I could be doing something more productive.
This is the primary output I received:
My secondary feedback was:
I found it useful to look at this hour-by-hour:
From all of this, I could summarise it along these lines:
The feedback is quite conclusive, between 13h00 and 15h30, there's 2.5 hours that could be used for something else. Now, we all need to rest, but I could break those 2.5 hours down into stepping away for some lunch, taking a walk, doing some stretches and then spending an hour or so on investing. That's essentially an extra hour every day that I could spend on checking my portfolio, learning about investing, making decisions, planning for the future and so the list goes on.
An hour a day, Monday to Thursday, works out to 16 hour a month - that's a huge amount of time. Heck, even if you took 2 hour per week to work on your finances, that would make a massive difference.
Look at it like this perhaps. 1 hour a day is 5 hours a week which is 22 hours per month, or 260 hours per year. We can take that a step further and recognise that this interprets to 3 full working days per month for 6.5 full work weeks across a year. Imagine how much you could do with that in terms of learning to invest, or managing your portfolio.
That's a remarkable amount of time!
Nothing overly fancy here, but perhaps these will create some inspiration at least:
It was fascinating to explore these prompts to see what ChatGPT gave back to me. I actually went ahead and used Grok as well, to see what insights it would offer up - I find it really valuable to use multiple LLMs for this sort of thing as they all offer a slightly different insight and that brings more to the forefront.
The Digital Diet Plan was intriguing, I most definitely picked up on a few things that I could adjust during certain hours to be more productive, or even to reduce cognitive strain. In turn, this assists with carving out time to focus on something more meaningful, be that health or investing, which was the purpose of this article.
Of course, there are applications available for this sort of thing that extends what I've shared so you're welcome to go that route, but I looked at this as an interesting once-off view of what I'm doing in order to show people that finding time is sometimes possible. Here are 3 apps I found if you're looking for more control over all of this:
I really enjoy analysing data so perhaps this process isn't for everyone, but at the very least, download the extension, upload the file and ask an LLM to take a quick look. Knowing whether time is being wasted is really valuable and I'm sure most people will gain something valuable from this.
