Lazy Tracking (Your Immersion Hours)
A lot of people aren’t tracking their immersion hours because they find it too much work. I have a few recommendations that you can use to make tracking your hours easy! No timers included. I’ll write this in order of least technical to most technical.
#0 How to Record your Hours
I recorded my hours via a notes app forever. This was easy but not ideal because I had to scroll down to my current spot and couldn’t do any graphs or calculations on it. A huge improvement I would recommend for those who are on iOS or macOS is to use the Shortcuts app to make a shortcut to input your minutes/hours into a spreadsheet automatically via a nice input interface. I have attached a screenshot of my shortcut structure that does this.
#1 Tracking via Episode
Honestly the best tracking to do is just to write down what episode you are on at the beginning of the day/week for the shows you are watching. Then at the end of the day/week just add up the duration of the episodes you’ve watched.
#2 Youtube App
If you use Youtube on mobile to immerse, the app allows you to track your time watched per day. Under settings it’s “Time Management”. I actually have multiple accounts under my Google account (all of which get my premium and are easy to switch between in-app). I’m not sure how to set this up, but I’m sure you can. So I use one account exclusively for active immersion and another exclusively for passive so it’s easy to know which time was which.
#3 Netflix Profile Viewed Tracking
If you use Netflix to immerse, there’s a very useful feature I’m sure many people don’t know. On the website, you can actually view the detailed list of episodes you watched. This isn’t perfect and doesn’t show the start/stop times or the durations, but it makes it easy to remember what you watched when.
#4 Plex Server & Prologue iOS app
If you have a Plex server (or are willing to set one up), using the Prologue app for iOS is the best way to do auditory immersion. It has detailed start/stop time history with duration. So it’s super easy to go back and track your hours as granular as needed.
#5 Plex Server & Tautulli
If you have a Plex server (or are willing to set one up), and if you plan to use it to watch content, make sure to install Tautulli. It allows for detailed time tracking of what you watch. Hopefully some of this is useful!