You have the power to a) better understand how you use your time and b) make radical yet easy changes to your day to ensure you use your time more effectively. Let's see how.

Understand Where Your Time Goes By Tracking It

There’s an old saying: “That which gets measured gets improved.” In order to improve your time management skills, the first thing you need to do is measure how you spend your time.

Before we get into how to best track your time, let me state that the goal of this exercise is to provide you with information that can lead to better decision-making. You can’t fix what you can’t see. Once we understand how we really spend our days, we can better organize and structure our weeks so that we carve out the time for the important work of our lives.

Furthermore, without time for rest, recovery, and some form of self-care, we all burn out. The key is to get in a few hours of deep work every day. Once that gets completed, we can shift our attention to the urgent, everyday tasks, and to acts of self-care. 

When we use a full week instead of a single day as our increment for planning, it becomes much easier to allocate time to friends, family, hobbies, etc. We can even schedule some time to scroll social media, watch TV, or nap! This way, we allow ourselves our pleasures, but in a way that doesn't result in us getting lost in a time vortex. Why? Because we've set an allocated amount of time for these activities. 

Finally, once we log our time, we can also see which part of the day we tend to be most productive, and which parts of the day our energy sags and we need to schedule a break. Armed with this information, we can deploy productivity methods that apply to our real lives. 

For example, if your most creative and productive time is in the morning, what can you do to protect that time? If you’re like many of us, especially those with children, this may entail getting up earlier than your family, when the house is quiet and distraction-free. Conversely, you might find that it’s too hard to squeeze out a few hours early in the morning. I had to flip my writing to the end of the day because even though my most creative time is in the morning, with triplets and an early riser for a wife, there are simply too many distractions. Instead of fighting it or forcing it, I simply flipped it. 

Exercise: Learn to Log Your Time

Logging your time allows you to focus on establishing productivity methods that actually apply to your real life, versus what you think you need to do. When we understand how we actually spend our time, we can begin to modify our schedule through both addition and subtraction. We can carve out time for rest and recovery by scheduling it. We can reduce our email and social media time by scheduling it.

Below are two approaches for tracking your time. If it’s your first time doing something like this, I recommend doing both, allotting one week for each. For the first week, focus on each task you do throughout the day. In addition to seeing how many times you switch between tasks or other distractions (e.g. social media or texts), you can also get a better handle on how long it takes to complete certain tasks. 

Then, for the second week, track your time in 15-minute increments. Tracking your time this way enables you to see big picture patterns. For example, you may begin to notice that your energy levels dip at a certain time of the day or you are more prone to distraction. Knowing this, you can structure your day to do your most important work when energy levels are the highest and do more of your administrative work during your lower energy periods. In addition, you can use this information to schedule breaks based on the type of work you're doing.

When I first tracked my time several years ago, I noticed that my most productive time was in the mornings. My energy levels were highest and my attention was focused. In the afternoon, my energy dipped and I found myself more easily distracted—checking email more frequently, scrolling newsfeeds, reading LinkedIn posts. 

Armed with this data, I structured my mornings with two 60-90 minute work sprints, with a 15-minute break in between. This is when I do my writing, create client proposals or presentations, or work on other creative projects. In the afternoon, I’ll do shorter work increments—usually 30-45 minute with 5-10 minute breaks in between. As a result, I get more work done in a few hours than I used to produce all day when I was bouncing from task to task and trying to grind through my lower energy times. 

Time Tracking Using Tasks:



• For the next week, track every task or activity that you do, starting from when you wake up until you go to sleep. 
• To do this, create a spreadsheet (digital or handwritten) and track your tasks/activities. To clarify, this means each and every task/activity. For example, if you are doing research from 9 am to 10 am, check Twitter for 10 minutes, take a 15-minute break to get a snack, then go back to research for 20 minutes, make an entry for each of those four tasks. 
• Note, if you check your email or TikTok while researching, make sure to log that too. We can’t see patterns, let alone do something with the data, if we aren’t honest in how we record it.
• With this method, you’ll go about your day and activities as normal, and simply write down what time you change tasks and start something new.
• Write down, to the minute, when you started and stopped doing something and moved on to a new activity.

Time Tracking Using Increments:

This week, instead of logging each individual activity, log your time in 15-minute increments. The best way to do this is to set a 15-minute timer. When it goes off, record what you were doing during that time (and remember to also track when you are taking a break from doing things–we all need to rest, take breaks, and recharge!). 

• For the next week, track everything you do in 15-minute increments. 
• Use this spreadsheet or a similar one (digital or handwritten) and track what you are doing in 15-minute increments. To clarify, when tracking by the time of day, you’ll write down your activity for a set chunk of time, say 9-9:15 am. Set a timer for every 15 minutes and take a quick second to jot down what you’ve been doing.

Next, take each week and create a summary report of how long you spend doing each activity. 

When I've had students do this exercise, they are always amazed at how much time they spend on social media. Most of them want to reduce it. Yet until they see how much time they spend scrolling throughout the day, they can’t take action. Before, they knew they had a problem with social media. Visualizing the data provided not only a wake up call for change, but the data to do something about it. 

Armed with their time data, we work on reducing or eliminating social media first thing in the morning and the last thing at night, and then we schedule it as a reward for completing their studying or assignments. The key is scheduling it, which makes the activity both time-bound and a reward. As a result, they free up hours of time each day AND reduce the anxiety caused by scrolling social media right before going to sleep and first thing upon waking. 

Once you have your own time tracking data, you can structure your day to be more effective with your time. In addition, as you free up time, you can begin thinking about other things you’d like to do more of—anything from taking a nap, to starting a hobby, to reading a book. As you get better at how you use your time and make time for rest and recovery, you will feel less rushed, make fewer mistakes, and enhance your creative problem-solving skills.

Finally, even if you don’t continue tracking at all after your two-week experiment is over, I strongly recommend conducting a time audit once a year. For this, you want to see how things may have changed. You can also use it to keep yourself on track or to re-align if things got off track.

Bringing It Home

Time tracking is tedious. It takes both time and attention—wo things already in short supply. Yet, like any investment, the results can be transformative. If you’re a creative or a contractor, you can schedule your day such that you protect the times you have the most energy to tackle your hardest tasks, while leaving your admin work to other parts of your day by batching. The extra time that you free up (and you will free up time by doing this) can be used to rest and recharge. 

By building in time to rest, you'll bring more creativity into your life. Just like how often our best ideas come to us in the shower, making time to unplug and rest opens the door for serendipity.

If you have a managerial role, you can schedule your day in a way that maximizes your productivity around your personal energy levels and also minimizes interruptions. You can then work with your team to build the same competency, such as by designating “interruption-free” times throughout the week. You may also choose to schedule “office hours” for team members to drop in for questions, instead of them pinging you throughout the day. You can schedule meetings around these protected times and watch the productivity and creativity of your team soar.

Finally, one of the greatest benefits of this time-tracking exercise is becoming aware of how much we switch between tasks throughout the day. Whether it's due to someone walking into your office, the ping of a new email, or a banner announcing the latest breaking news, these interruptions crush productivity. Whether you’re a creative working alone or managing others, singletasking is a superpower. Once harnessed, you will get far more done, in less time, and with less anxiety.

In the next article, I’ll show you what multitasking is costing you, what you can do to diminish it, and some steps you can implement right now to stop it from eating up all your time. In doing so, you'll get back in charge of how you spend your time.