[T-973] Can you clock passive immersion?

Dear Rine,

I caught the quantified-self bug. I catch it from time to time like people catch a cold.

The bug is much more potent this time, though, because it’s empowered by my newly-found command of org-mode.

So in my enthusiasm to measure everything, today I rummaged through a discarded gadget box in my closet, looking for my old Casio wristwatch in order to measure my passive immersion time.

The Casio in question is one of those half-analog half-digital poor man’s smart watches. Back in the day I relied heavily on its timer function to clock my pomodoros, annoying my colleagues at work with constant beeping.

Since we now live in a work-from-home era, I no longer have judgmental colleagues to worry about.

So I put the Casio watch on my wrist right next to my regular Seiko timepiece, intent on pressing the start/stop button each time I pop in or pop out my immersion earbud.

Unfortunately, I forgot that the whole reason my Casio was in the discarded gadget basket in the first place was because I worked the timer button loose from all those pomodoros.

And besides, the metal bracelet is clunky and it’s not nice to wear two of them.

Don’t ask me why I don’t ditch my regular watch for the Casio. I like my Seiko watch too much by now. It displays workdays in kanji.

Anyhow, I abandoned the experiment after clocking about 40 minutes of passive listening in that part of the day.

My takeaway is that measuring passive immersion would perhaps be doable with one of those cheap digital watches with a silicon strap. You could just keep it on your right hand below the sleeve line and discreetly start and stop whenever you pop an earbud.

But maybe another time. For now I’ll clock active immersion.

What I planned/did