I highly recommend EVERYONE try tracking their time, for at least a couple weeks.
It’ll reveal a lot.
But there’s a twist …
I don’t mean just your work time (which most of us can do with our calendars). I mean EVERYTHING. A full 168 hours each week.
I didn’t originate this idea; it comes from two great books by Laura Vanderkam – 168 Hours and I Know How She Does It (the latter, despite its title, is equally relevant to men). She even has templates on her website that will help get you started, though you’ll likely want to customize them. I made a version with conditional formatting so everything shows up colour-coded, and lots of other little nerdy twists to help me analyze it all.
But before we go there, start with some simple math. Sleep 8 hours a day (56 / week), work 45 hours, and you’re left with 67 hours – 9.5 a day. For those of us who say we have “no time” for anything but work, what are we doing with these?
The conclusions can be stunning. You’ll likely find, for one, that you work a LOT less than you think. The first full week I tracked, I ended up with 48 hours – had I been asked, I would have guesstimated 60. Especially in the before times, when “work” for most of us included commuting and a lot of water-cooler talk, it’s easy to think how 48 “real” hours could become 70+ in our minds.
You’ll also find that you sleep a lot MORE than you think. I feel like I get no sleep at all, but looking across the past 8 weeks, it’s actually quite consistent at around 47 hours a week. The “worst” was 45.5, which is still about 6.5 / night – probably less than ideal, but not seriously concerning.
What was concerning, though? Finally putting a number beside all the time I basically wasted. I always knew I spent too much time on mindless content browsing – for me it’s the three-headed hydra of unproductivity known as Instagram / Reddit / Youtube. But seeing the first week’s total was a massive kick in the pants (which I shudder to reveal): 21.5 hours on TV/Internet!
Even worse, this is actually an undercount, because quick hits at the gym or while doing something else don’t show up. I’m only counting 30-minute (or greater) blocks where I was doing nothing other than browsing / watching.
Everybody needs time to decompress, so I’m not suggesting that number needed to be zero. You might have a similar number and you might be perfectly fine with it – and that’s great! But for me, it certainly put the lie to being “too busy” for anything. And with everything I want to accomplish, I decided then and there that spending a half-time job’s worth of hours on Internet surfing was not acceptable.
As I did here, you’ll likely find that the observer effect comes into play, where your behaviour shifts even without an explicit plan. But there are also ways to turn this into more direct action, which I’ll articulate in a follow-up post.
Have you ever tracked your time? What did it reveal?