Gain Power over Your Time with Time Tracking
If you’ve ever had the pleasure of working at an agency or law or consulting firm that bills by time, you know what it’s like to track your time. It can be painful.
But, if you want to get a handle on your schedule or make sure you are putting your time to the activities that have the most impact, it’s a great practice, even if you only track for a short time. Again, it will feel laborious, but you will gain insight and power over how you use your time for the benefit of you and those around you.
I’ve been tracking my hours consistently every day since the end of 2020, and it’s been illuminating, giving me visibility to the time projects take and helping me better prioritize and strategize how to manage my time and projects going forward. I continue to uncover new insights and draw new conclusions as I move forward with the practice.
Want to test it out yourself? Here are 5 tips to get started tracking and gaining control of your time:
Time tracking system. First, download an app that helps you track your time. I use Toggl Track’s free version. It’s easy to sign up and get started. Here’s an article that rates a handful of options.
Tracking structure. Next determine how you want to track your time allocating your hours across different projects, tasks, and “clients.” Clients can include “Personal projects” or “Creative projects.” The app you use will likely influence how you track (i.e., how do they structure the tracking function), but importantly define the buckets that are important to you to analyze at the end of a week, month, quarter, and/or year.
Daily, hourly tracking. I recommend you try your best to track your hours as you go throughout your day, as it can be a bit annoying to have to go back at the end of the day and record your hours. However, I recommend you do that at least once during the first week, as the exercise can be illuminating. You may just find that you can’t account for all the hours. You know you were “at work” from 8:30 am to 6 pm, but you can only record time for 7 of the 9.5 hours. In that moment you might be shocked by the realization that you can’t quite figure out where the remaining time went. You may start to ask yourself, “Do I really go to the bathroom that often? Do I really stop to take breaks, to eat, or to look at email or social media for that much time?” The answer could be “yes,” and in that simple act you have more awareness of your time. For example, you could take this to mean that there is a certain amount of time that is needed for natural breaks in a day to allow you to function well. You may start to question if you are wasting some of your time on low level activities, such as checking email or social media.
Analyze. As noted in Step #3, you can analyze your hours at the end of the day and draw conclusions. It’s also helpful to analyze the hours at the end of a week and a month and then to also analyze the trend over time. Where are your hours going? To what projects and tasks? For example, I started to see a surprising trend of me spending 15+ hours a week on creative, asset-building work. That was an eye-opener. I had no idea that the work was taking that many hours. It made sense when I was able to see all of the entries; nothing was out of whack. But now I had the opportunity to determine if I wanted to be investing that many hours against those activities. If I did, I knew I needed to reduce the hours I was putting elsewhere so that the total hour load I had each week was better in-tune for me to operate at my best. If I had not been tracking my time, there’s no way I would have drawn that conclusion and been in a position to make choices around how I was spending my time.
Time perspective. One of my favorite books is “Einstein’s Dreams,” by Alan Lightman, and it’s a clever and fascinating examination of views on time (e.g., what if time went backwards, what if we experienced time at different paces, what if time existed only in the present). What if we were to challenge ourselves to see time differently (e.g., this is an event I should speed up, this is an event where we need to slow it down, this is a time to pause, this is a time to invest in the quality of the time rather than the quantity)?
With more information about where your time is going now, you have more power to bring both perspective to it and better craft how to best use your time to serve you best, from sustaining yourself to meeting your personal and professional goals. It’s helpful in looking back at your hours analysis to ask if you are using your time in alignment with your values. For example, is there time for you to honor your values around health, family, and learning and growth? Are you using your hours in alignment with your current priorities across your professional and personal lives? Is there an area in which you are over-investing? Is there an area in which you are under-investing?
You can also start to gain more awareness of how you need to manage and structure your time to serve you best. For example, you might start to realize that as a leader you need thinking time. And for you to think and really dig deep into a topic, you need at least 3 hours. With that kind of awareness, you can start to manage your calendar differently. The same awareness could be gained for someone who does creative work and needs chunks of time to be fully immersed in a project. Again, with that kind of awareness, you can have conversations and negotiate with your boss or management on what you need to do your best work.
Another scenario is that you may start to realize that while you only have 1.5 hours with your young children after work what’s important is the quality of that time and being present in the moment.
As I’ve forewarned several times, time tracking may seem like a nuisance or a waste of time itself. Yet, on the contrary, information is power. It's worth the short-term (or long-term) pain (or small inconvenience) to get clarity on where all your time goes and benefit from the insights of analysis. You can get control of your time and make better use of it if you have visibility to where it’s going in the first place.
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