I have an additional question regarding the “time played” statistic. This is visible in the “More stats” as “Total time played”, as well as in the data table with daily detail.
My phone has a “wellbeing” app that keeps track of the time spent on every app. The time this app tells me that I spend on Clozemaster is roughly the double of the time Clozemaster says I “played”.
My question is: what exactly is counted in the “play time” Clozemaster records? Is it only during rounds of reviews? Or, specifically the time where I am filling in the cloze? (i.e., if I validate the cloze, then check some words on the wiktionary while staying in the Clozemaster app, then adding a grammar note on the cloze sentence: is this recorded in “time played”?).
I use this statistic to ensure I spend a regular yet manageable time on Clozemaster every day, to avoid a feeling of overwhelm which requires me to take a break. However, as the Clozemaster time seems to be an underestimation of my total time spent on the app, I can only have a relative measure of my time spent - i.e. : it increased or decreased, but I can’t use the absolute value.
If, in the future, Clozemaster included the statistic for an additional “time spent”, which would be more comprehensive and cover all the time spent in the app, this could be a nice complement to the current time spent in review!
I don’t know the fine points of how Clozemaster calculates time spent playing. However, at the bottom of every leaderboard (either per-language or overall), you can see “Max 15 seconds per sentence played.” This in itself is probably enough to account for the discrepancy between the time it calculates and the time your wellbeing app measures.
I can understand why Clozemaster introduces this limitation. As it does with its other statistics, it shows you how you rank against other players, which can motivate you to compete against them (and thus indirectly yourself). However, the other statistics require activity on your part, so they’re harder to “game”. In order to keep you from simply “winning” by spending an arbitrarily long period of time on a single sentence, the app introduces a time limit.
Your “wellbeing” app has a different motivation, namely to tell you how much time you personally spend on a particular activity, information that you can use to measure your progress towards a goal, or determine whether you have a good balance in your life. If that’s what interests you, I suspect that your app is already giving you better information than you’re ever going to get from Clozemaster.
Hi, great answer! This makes a lot of sense.
The only catch with your proposal to use my wellbeing app directly is that its data cannot get extracted, and it only gets stored for a few weeks. I like clozemaster’s big data table because it enables me to check how my time spent relates to other variables. I put in the same sheet the 7-day average of new clozes and the 7-day average of time spent, and that tells me what is a good choice of new clozes per day to be able to spend a certain time per day. Hope that makes sense.
I would also argue that even though this would be a “wellbeing metric”, in reality it is also relevant for learning, because the most efficient way to learn is to be regular. As mentioned in the OP, my main motivation is to ensure I can maximize my new words per day by keeping a steady flow without ever being overwhelmed or tired of it.