I recently wrote the introduction to this series on My Quantified Life. If you haven’t read it yet, you ought to pop over there, read that post and then come back. I’ll wait…
While my tracking journey started with health and exercise-related items, the past few years I’ve gotten even more success from tracking how I’m using my time. In a lot of ways, time is like nutrition. Until you actually track it and codify where the calories are coming from, you’re working from a set of assumptions that are not based in reality. Tracking all the calories you consume, just for a couple of days, can be eye-opening. You suddenly realize that handful of nuts is 400, essentially empty, calories. It’s possible to change your eating habits after a very short time tracking what you eat.
Time is a bit different, since very few people have much consistency to their days. I found that I needed to track about two weeks worth of time before I was able to gather enough data to be useful. When I started my time tracking, I did it on paper. I created a gridded form with a column for each day of the week and a row for 30 minute increments for the day. I also set a timer to go off every 30 minutes. When the timer went off, I would take a couple of seconds and write down what I had done during the past half hour.
That systems worked ok, but I discovered I had too many different types of things I was doing. I needed some sort of structure to organize the data. I tried all sorts of different approaches, but eventually settled on categorizing what I was doing into the five Areas of Focus that I’m still using:
- Business
- Family
- Financial
- Household
- Personal
At the end of every week, I would grab my five differently colored highlighters and mark up the tracking sheet I’d used for the prior week. Everything that was business-related was highlighted in blue, all the family activities were red, financial was green, and so on. Then I would add up the number of blocks of each color to understand where I’d spent my time during the week.
Some days I did really well, always recording what I had been doing when the timer went off. Other days I would fail to record a large majority of the day. I tried to recreate those days, but it was extremely difficult. Plus I discovered that the 30 minute increments were too long. Often I would do three things inside one of those blocks and I would be forced to decide which one I was going to write down. Plus the administrative work at the end of the week was a killer. It did afford me the opportunity to look things over, but the time it took was far too long for the benefit.
I started looking for an app to help me out. After testing several apps, having heated discussions with devotees of many of them, and generally trying to figure out what I wanted, I settled on aTimeLogger 2. I did a test run of the app from April 29 through April 30, 2016 and then went full-bore into using it in May of 2016. I’ve been using it to track my time ever since.
Using the app added an entirely new dimension to my time tracking. Whenever I start a new activity, I start a new timer designating that task. At first I continued with my tracking in the five Areas of Focus. By December 2016 I was tired of having 30-35% of my time not showing up in aTimeLogger. This was my sleep, so I added a sixth Area of Focus for Sleep. That allowed me to track 100% of my time every day. Since January 2017 I have tracked every minute of every day. As time has gone on, I’ve added another layer of specificity to my timers. So inside the Business Area of Focus, I’ve got the following subcategories:
- Administration
- Outside Businesses
- Editing
- Consumption
- Creation
- Learning
- Marketing
- Planning
- Relationship Building
- Research
- Social Media Consumption
- Social Media Creation
- Writing
- Other Business
Before I started writing this blog post, I was doing planing for the Quantified Life series, so I had the Business | Planning timer running. When I started writing, I started the Business | Writing timer. Within the preferences of aTimeLogger 2 you can decide whether starting one timer will stop the prior timer or leave it running. I can see reasons to run multiple timers, but I’ve decided I’m only going to run one at a time.
One example of having overlapping timers would be if I simultaneously wanted to charge my time to a particular client. I might be doing any of the aforementioned business tasks for that client, so it might make sense to have the overlaid timers. But for now, that’s not something I’m doing.
I know, that sounds really daunting, but in reality, once I built the habit (after just a couple days), it became second nature. The mechanics of stopping and starting a timer are simple, but I’ve simplified things further by using Siri Shortcuts to attach phrases to each of my timers. While it took some time to set configure the phrases and to learn them, the payoff has been outstanding. In reality, when I switched from the Planning of the blog series to Writing this post, I said, “Hey Siri, I’m Writing”. Siri did all the heavy lifting and instructed aTimeLogger 2 to stop the Planning timer and start the Writing timer.
While collecting the data concerning how I’m using my time is helpful, that’s not where the real gold is.
With a single click, I can see a daily view of my time usage as either a daily agenda or a donut graph. The daily agenda is useful to get an idea of how much I’m thrashing between different activities. If I see a long run of a single color (denoting work within a particular Area of Focus, I know I didn’t have to switch activities very much. At least within the top-level of the Areas of Focus. The donut graph is useful because it shows the percentage of the day spent in each Area of Focus. Since I theme my days, I try to stay primarily inside a particular Area of Focus for much of the day. That means I expect to see a larger percentage of the day spent in one color. Other days I know I need to balance things…and the donut graph is useful to present that as well.
Of course, because I’m a data nerd I also export the raw data to a Google Sheet and do further analysis there. In an upcoming post I’ll present how I use the retrospective data from aTimeLogger 2 to help drive my Time Budgeting for the upcoming months.
So here’s the bottom line: Until you actually track what you’re doing, it’s going to be quite difficult to change anything. We all have our perceptions of what we’re doing and almost universally those perceptions are skewed. When I started my time tracking, I was sure that I spent a huge chunk of my day in the Business Area of Focus. Then when I had the data in front of me, I was totally stunned. I wasn’t spending anywhere near as much time in that AOF as I’d thought. Of course, part of that comes from working from home. It’s just too easy to jump up and do a load of laundry, empty the dishwasher, or engage is some other household task. In fact, those first few weeks when I started my tracking I discovered I was spending about half as much time on Business activities as I thought I was.
While I’m a huge proponent of using an app (my favorite aTimeLogger 2 or the current hot app Toggl), there is not really magic to the apps. You can just as easily jot down your time on a 3×5 index card or a sheet of paper. But you have to do more than just record the time, you need to analyze how you’re spending it versus how you want to spend it. That’s what we’re going to cover in a future post…Time Budgeting.
In the meantime, consider tracking your time for a couple of days, parceling it out into categories that matter to you. Then look at how you’re spending time and start thinking about how you would like to be spending your time.
I’m willing to wager you’ll find the all sorts of surprises!
