Best Results Organizing

 
Have you ever reached the end of a day, collapsed onto your couch, and thought, “Where did the day go?”

Time is slippery like that—it vanishes into the ether when we’re stuck in meetings, running errands, or just hanging out and taking a truly shocking number of trips to the fridge.

Back in May 2020, I wrote Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is? 5 Strategies to Cope With Pandemic Time Dilation. That post looked at how stress and the lack of novelty in our days (such as during lockdown, when every day is much like any other, or that mystery week between Christmas and New Year’s, where nothing feels “real”) can make us lose touch with our experience of time.

Conversely, how do you feel when your schedule is jam-packed with back-to-back client meetings, or there’s no breathing room between getting the kids to school and yourself to work and then reversing course at the end of the day and taking care of everyone else’s needs and you don’t have a minute to exhale? (Did you feel out of breath getting to the end of that run-on sentence?)

When we don’t have variety — it’s the spice of life, or haven’t you heard? — or we’re overtaxed without the chance to pause and reflect, time can cease to have any meaning. 

That’s where time tracking comes in: it’s like a GPS for your hours, showing you exactly where your minutes travel without you noticing. Unfortunately, the idea of logging every little thing you do can feel about as appealing as untangling a drawer full of mismatched USB charging cables. It doesn’t have to be that way, though.

This past week, I’ve been participating in Laura Vanderkam’s Time Tracking challenge. (She has a free Time Makeover Guide and time-tracking spreadsheets in 15-minute and 30-minute increments, each in PDF, Excel, and Google formats.)

I’ve done Laura’s challenges each January for several years, and am always intrigued by how it impacts my productivity during the week even before I start analyzing the data. (More on that next week!)

Before we move on, I have to put in a plug for two of my favorite books Laura’s, her classic 168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think and the oft-mentioned Tranquility by Tuesday: 9 Ways to Calm the Chaos and Make Time for What Matters.

Today, we’re going to look at the perks and pitfalls of time tracking and see how to make it work for you (without driving yourself loopy). 

The Benefits of Time Tracking

If you’ve ever worked a job where your supervisor required you to report what you did with every moment of your day, you may be (understandably) disgusted with the concept of time tracking. When forced to track the minutia of your day for someone else to analyze it, you can feel judged, micromanaged, maybe even infantilized.

However, when you track your own time, it can be empowering. In fact, time tracking may reveal some surprising insights about your daily habits.

Yes, you may have scrolled your social media feed for far too many sessions for your comfort, but tracking your time might help you see that right before most of those digital mental escapes, you were dealing with cranky customers or a stress-inducing in-law, or you were sluggish post-meal.

No one moment stands on its own, so tracking your time doesn’t merely show you what you’ve done, when, and for how long, but shows the pattern of your time usage. Whether your behavior is consistent or inconsistent over time can help you dig a little deeper than knowing you worked on a blog post for 47 minutes or that you spent an hour and a half at Target. 

Let’s look at some of the ways time tracking helps.

Mindfulness and Focus

By virtue of measuring something, we bring our attention to it. Without attention to how you’ve been spending your time, there’s little chance of intentionally spending in more effective and efficient ways.

If I asked you what you did last Friday afternoon, you might recall a major event you’d been working toward, unexpected occurrences (whether positive or, more likely, negative), and annoyances (whether large or small), but remember little of the granularity of your day. Time tracking helps you identify, in as granular and detailed a way as you like, how you really spend your time vs. your perceived activity and time usage.

Once you mindfully pay attention to what you’re doing (or have just done, over the last half hour) and log it, it will be easier to highlight when you’ve been inefficient (e.g., fighting with a piece of software vs. having someone help you figure out what’s wrong) or areas for improving what you do, how you do it, or when you do it, and figure out what you might want to delegate, or stop doing altogether. 

But you can’t go by your gut, because your gut makes small annoyances seem larger (especially if they are repeated over time) and as though they lasted longer than they actually did. 

Tracking our time allows us to measure how we deal with all manner of experiences, and that focused attention helps us better predict our future time needs.

Prioritization

It’s not only a matter of catching yourself “wasting” time, or even spending too much time on the wrong thing. Time tracking clarifies which tasks consume the most time and effort; it’s your role to analyze whether the things taking the most time represent what’s the most valuable.

Are the unimportant things taking a lot of time, leaving you few high-focus and high-energy sections of your day to focus on what’s meaningful?

Do your actions and the use of your time match your goals and values?

Do your actions and the use of your time match your goals and values? Share on X

Of course, not everything that takes the most time is the most important for you to accomplish, and vice versa. Time tracking, and seeing how much time you currently put into accomplishing certain tasks, can help you distinguish between what’s “urgent” and/or “important,” as we’ve frequently discussed when reviewing the Eisenhower Decision Matrix. 

Only then can you “wasted” energy toward what really matters.

Data-Driven Decision-Making

Having actual numbers to back up your interpretation of what’s working (and what’s not) in your schedule is a game-changer. It will grant you actionable insights — prompts for what to do differently — to optimize your current routines and workflows.

When you time track, you’ll have a real-time account of where your time goes — towards what is:

• important and urgent
• important but requiring scheduling during your “deep work” hours
• urgent but unimportant and can be delegated, and
• what’s really so lacking in urgency and importance that it can be drop-kicked into Never-never Land.

In this way, time tracking supports goal-setting and monitoring progress over time. 

Time tracking identifies how long tasks take, enabling better planning based on more realistic estimates of how long certain tasks will take to complete in the future. 

Stress Busting

Oh, and those realistic estimates time tracking produces? They can reduce overwhelm* by showing you what you can reasonably do (and what you can’t) in the course of a day so that you’ll stop trying to ten pounds of sugar tasks into a five-pound sack of schedule.

If you can clearly see that you can’t get a blog post done in an hour when your kids are at home (or that trying to get it done in one long sitting will keep you from getting seven other things done), you’ll stop forcing yourself to live by unreasonable, unrealistic expectations.

In turn, this can empower you to set better boundaries (for yourself, and for others who demand or encroach on your time) and ensure you schedule breaks more effectively so that you’re doing high-focus deep work when you have high mental energy.

Accountability

A well-known saying is that what we measure gets done. If you’ve ever been in Weight Watchers, you know that they make you log everything you eat. When you know someone’s going to look at your seventeen logged mini Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups on Thursday night, you’re more likely to put the bag back after your third nibble, and maybe lose some weight.

Similarly, while the purpose of tracking time is to get a realistic take on what you’re doing with your time, knowing that you’ll be judging your time use later may help you avoid self-soothing “time wasters” when you’re on deadline and need to stay on task.

Time tracking encourages greater tasks focus in real time. You’ll anticipate, note, and deter distractions when you’re aware of how every minute counts toward your goals. (And while you may not like the experience of judging yourself, it’s better than when your boss does it, right?)

The Challenges and Obstacles of Time Tracking

The concept of time tracking is a great one, but even great things can be problematic. We need to be realistic about how it can trip us up so we can avoid falling over Dick Van Dyke’s ottoman.

 

Time tracking can be a time sink. Remember that asterisk above about how time tracking can reduce overwhelm? It can, but when tracking your time feels like it’s eating into your day because you have to stop too often to note what you’re doing, you may get frustrated.

Time tracking can interrupt your flow. Some people try to track their time so contemporaneously with their actions that they can’t focus on their deep-focus or creative work. 

Time tracking can be boring. There’s tedium in tracking everything. Time tracking can feel counterproductive if you’re taking time away from productive activities to note what you’re doing too many times in the course of an hour.

Time tracking may be used to procrastinate. If you don’t like what you’re doing, either at work or with your life, it’s easy to spend a lot of time fussing over color-coding or pretty fonts (or all the bells and whistles of a digital tracker) to the point where you’re not really leaving much time for the real work.

Perfectionism paralysis can be a type of procrastination. If you obsess over every detail of how you track your minutes, to the point that tracking your time causes you to stress about starting any task, very little of your actual work will get done. 

Additionally, resistance to change can short-circuit your efforts in two ways.

First, for people who have mental roadblocks to starting a new habit, it can be difficult to train themselves to track their time. If you’re resistant to making the effort to track time, none of the benefits of time tracking can be reaped.

A second, more insidious problem is that the data you get — and the realization of what you’re really doing with your time (whether wasting it or giving too much time to others as a people pleaser, or just being stuck in crummy jobs or relationships) — may force an issue you’re not ready to deal with.

For time tracking to be meaningful, you have to ask yourself: are you ready to confront your inefficiencies or bad situations? And are you ready to make changes based on what you learn?

For time tracking to be meaningful, you have to ask yourself: are you ready to confront your inefficiencies or bad situations? And are you ready to make changes based on what you learn? Share on X

Finally, the prospect of time tracking can trigger privacy concerns. If you’ll dillydally over selecting a digital time-tracking tool because of concerns over privacy, you have two alternatives: choose tools that respect your data boundaries or opt for analog tracking.

Make Time Tracking Work for You

So, how do you avoid those pitfalls?

Start Small

If you anticipate feeling overwhelmed by the practice of time tracking, know that you aren’t bound by any overly ambitious practice. Take baby steps.

For example, aim for a single-day experiment on a random Wednesday when you’re not anticipating major kerfuffles in your schedule.

Similarly, don’t feel like you have to start out with too granular a measurement. I generally track in 15-minute increments, but you might feel more comfortable in 30-minute slots. You’re not writing down the call you made at 1:02 p.m., 1:16 p.m., and 1:22 p.m., but rather “Made client confirmation calls” from 1-1:30 p.m. If that thirty minute slot of one category of activity yields enough information, so be it.

Once you’ve tried a one-day tracking effort, you could opt to expand, gently. For example:

• Try one tracking day per month, changing the day of the week each time. You get two chances at a “normal” Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, and can either take two monthly breaks, maybe during summer vacation and December, or use some months to track weekend days to analyze how your personal time is flowing.
• Consider one time-tracking week each year. As noted, I do this as part of Laura Vanderkam’s annual January challenge, but you could do it each spring as a time management refresher, or to coincide with the fresh start of back-to-school each fall.
• Track just the time that you suspect is harboring your time gremlins and vampires. If you (and your team) are satisfied with all you accomplish during the workday, but you feel like you’re doggy paddling at home, then tracking your office tasks may not be necessary.

Pick the Right Tools for You

When I track my time, I do a week at a time on an Excel spreadsheet with columns for each day of the week and rows for each quarter hour, which I keep open but minimized on my screen.

You could use a pre-made tracker or create one for yourself. Or go really low-tech and draw or write out your daily blocks of time from waking to bedtime on a sheet of notebook paper or graph paper — or just track your work hours. (But remember, if you do decide to color-code or make it fancy, do that during your planned recreation time time and not during the period you should be doing the logged, tracked work!)

Alternatively, there are numerous digital time tracking software programs and apps, including:

• Rescue Time — This is the grand-daddy of time tracking software; I wrote about it seventeen years ago, when I first started blogging. Rescue Time will automatically track all of your computer-based work and then provide reports on your time trends. Rescue Time has solo and team plans, all paid (after a 14-day free trial).

 

• Toggl Track — This veteran platform offers free (for up to five users) automated time tracking, making it ideal for solopreneurs and freelancers, with paid versions for teams. It’s accessible from anywhere via computers or mobile devices.

• Timeular — If you want completely seamless time tracking that’s operating system-agnostic (it works on Android, iOS, Windows, Mac, Web, Linux) and an offline tracking option, Timeular may be for you. However, note that it’s paid-only (after a 30-day free trial). Timeular also has an AI tracker and a cool physical tracker (an eight-sided doohickey where you can assign and link facets of the doohickey to categories of work you do).

• Clockify — This time tracking software has plans ranging from free, basic, and standard, to pro and enterprise levels, with increasing variety of features. It’s more basic than Toggl Track, but also feels a bit easier to learn. Even the free level has unlimited tracking, reports, projects, and users.

• Harvest — This offers free, pro, and premium plans and is designed for freelancers. It’s available for all major operating systems (Android, iOS, Windows, Mac, Web, as well as browser extensions). While it’s simple to learn and has myriad integrations with other software programs, the free plan is fairly limited. (If you’re just starting to explore time tracking, though, simple is better!)

 

• Memtime — This has a pretty minimalist interface, so the simplified, automatic time tracking makes it super-easy to use. However, it’s only available for desktop use (so, no mobile tracking) and it’s a paid-only platform (after a 14-day free trial), so it wouldn’t be your best option for first-effort time tracking. Above the basic level, it offers a wide variety of software integrations. Note that Memtime claims, “We’re the only automatic time tracker that guarantees privacy by keeping your activity data offline.” 

 

If you want something less corporate and more minimalist and mindful in a time tracker, you might want to look at Hourlytics (iOS-only) or Balance (MacOS-only). If everything you need to track is computer based, Monitup has an AI-based tracker, but if you’re cool logging everything on the phone, HoursTracker® Time Tracker works on iOS and Android.

Only you know what kind of tracking system — analog, basic spreadsheet, or digital app — will keep you committed to the experience.

Think Patterns, Not Perfection

It’s easy to note one-off times where you went down a rabbit hole on a particular research project or social media thread, but don’t beat yourself up over less-than-ideal time use.

Punishment isn’t the point! Instead, remember that one purpose of time tracking is investigating what doesn’t work so you can find what does.

Because of this, focus on trends. Are you always in a slump after lunch, distracting you from high-focus mental tasks? Maybe you need to schedule more physical tasks until you work off that post-lunch sluggishness, or try tasks that take less brain power. 

Set Goals, Then Support Them

Your time tracking efforts will yield a wealth of information about what you’re doing that barely registers in your mind as a “task” (like picking up after your kids or straightening the company supply closet because everyone else leaves it a mess). You’ll see what’s taking too much time, what should be scheduled at different times (or delegated or given up on altogether), and where you have opportunities to do more things or do the same things differently.

Use what you learn from time tracking to help you set your goals; think: what gives you joy or feeds your values? Then schedule supporting efforts in a way to improve your productivity on the things that matter the most to you, whether it’s for money-generating work or happiness-generating life.

The Big Picture

I get why time tracking has a bad rap. If you ever had a bad boss like Gary Cole’s passive-aggressive Bill Lumberg from Office Space, you probably only remember the nasty edge of being asked to track your time.

 

We should reframe time tracking as a positive, empowering practice, just like practicing mindfulness, gratitude, yoga, or anything that benefits personal development. If we choose to see time tracking’s value as a learning tool about ourselves, rather than a rigid system leading to pejorative judgment, we can reap some pretty impressive benefits.

Time tracking doesn’t need to be done 24/7/365. And tracking your time without reflecting on what your data tells you is going to have fairly limited results. But periodic time tracking, with reflection and review of that data, will help you refine your routines so your schedule of what you do and when you do it can guarantee more wins. Just remember to:

• Find balance — Be just comprehensive enough in your tracking to yield good, meaningful data, but not so much that it becomes a source of stress or uses too much of your time. Make your system flexible.
• Embrace the unexpected — Be openminded about what you find. Even the act of tracking less-productive moments (hello, social media!) can teach you something about yourself and your needs — variety in your workflow, downtime, or maybe even for a different job or relationship that builds you up instead of draining your energy and causing you to self-soothe to inefficient levels.

Time tracking is your personal productivity GPS. Use it to help you read the map of your life, identify where you are, and travel the best possible path to your preferred destination.

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Today’s post was about the literal passage of time — being mindful what we are doing with it — so that we can be more productive and self-aware.

But as I noted at the start, time is slippery. I’m sure you’ve heard the expression, “The days are long, but the hours are short.” We spend a lot of time rushing to accomplish tasks, mostly for others but sometimes for ourselves, but our awareness of time (and the passage of it), both on a daily basis and as the infrastructure of our lives, can be murky.

Next week, we’re going to look at how we can do more to appreciate the speed of the passage of time to organize a life that better reflects what we want. I’ll also share tools to help us stay mindfully aware of the passing of our moments, our days, and our years.

Do you track your time? Share in the comments!