10 Time Tracking Tips to Accurately Chart Your Time, Energy, and Attention
Humans are terrible at estimating how long something is going to take. And we’re not good at estimating how long it took us to do something.
There are really only two ways to tell how much time you spend in any given week doing the myriad tasks that make up your life.
- Hire someone to follow you every waking minute (or just during your work hours).
- Keep track of time on yourself.
Since most people won’t choose the former (although it *is* an option), let’s explore ten tips to help you do the latter.
- If you use an electronic calendar, make sure you have recorded all your appointments and meetings. Then print it out so you have it as a base to work from.
- If you don’t use an electronic calendar, print blank pages from your computer’s calendar program (for example, Outlook) or create a calendar showing the hours for which you want to keep a time record.
- Regardless of which of the above you use, you should have a schedule in which you record your various tasks, activities, and appointments.
- Prepare to keep track of time for an entire week. No one has “typical” days or “average” days. You need a 5-7 day spectrum to get a clear idea of where and how you spend your time.
- Starting at the beginning of your work day (or when you get up in the morning), take note of what you are doing. Although great detail is not necessary, it is useful to record appropriate information to allow for further analysis.
- Every time you change activities, record the time and make a note of the new activity. The assumption will be that you continued with the previous activity until you register the change.
- Consider everything you do, including each change in mental focus, as a change to record. For example, if you are working on a budget analysis and you stop to think about another project you are working on, that is a change and time should be recorded. If you aggregate or group what you’re doing, you’ll have a less clear and less helpful picture of how you’re actually spending your time. This obviously defeats the purpose of keeping a time chart.
- When you leave your office or wherever you are keeping your time log, take it with youif it is feasible.
- If you do not carry your log with you, please do your best to accurately record what you did. during the time you left.
- At the end of each day, review what you have written downdeveloping any details that you have not captured during the day.
Keeping a time log, using these 10 guidelines, will give you a picture of your day. As I always say, to know what we value, look at our time log.
