Time Tracking

Day 233 / 365

So carrying on our theme for productivity, today I wanted to write about one strategy that is incredibly useful but severely underutilized — Time Tracking.

Some of us get a lot done every day, while others just have things piling up in their never-ending todo list. Everyone gets the same 24 hours a day, then why do most of us complain we don’t have time left to do anything?

The reason is simple, you are wasting way more time than you can imagine. A good exercise to do is to sit with a stopwatch when you are working and measure the time when you fully concentrated at your work. This means you wouldn’t count the coffee breaks, or checking your phone, chatting with your co-workers. You will be surprised to see that out of the 8 or so hours you spend at your office, how little you actually use for work.

It’s easy to waste time because time is abstract, it’s not something you can see or feel. Also, people tend to waste time in short amounts. A quick call, a short nap, or another 5-minute youtube video. What we fail to realize is that all these small amounts add up over the day to several hours. These are the hours you could have utilized for something better, like reading a book or exercising.

You may think that tracking each and every minute of your day may seem a little extreme, but I will absolutely recommend giving it a try at least for a few days. For the long term, however, you can do what I do and break your day into 15-minute intervals and plan how you are going to spend those. It’s not as difficult as it seems.

And always have the bigger picture in mind. If you can take out even an hour each day and put it into something useful, over the year it would mean 365 hours spent towards achieving your goals!

This post is part of my 365 Day Project for 2019. Read about it here

Yesterday’s blog — The Rule of 3 for productivity