There’s not gonna be a proper answer that applies to everyone. For myself, riding BMX flatland, riding unicycles, carving wood, learning survival skills…

… keeping time?

Check my username. I’ve been partly obsessed with keeping accurate track of time since I learned to read an analog clock at age 9.

By age 12, I started learning the exact times of the school bells. By age 15, I learned how to rebuild digital watches, and even replace the quartz crystal with a more accurate one.

By age 17 I was rebuilding mechanical self-winding wristwatches, and also learning to overclock computers.

Sounds like you should pursue a career at NIST so your hobby can align with a profession. They’re all about keeping track of time to extreme precision with atomic and optical clocks.