Earlier this week I mentioned I track my time pretty closely, and by some coincidence I stumbled across Jurgen Appelo talking about the same topic today. I couldn’t get a comment to post on his blog (Jurgen, if it helps, I’m on Safari 5.1,) so here’s an expanded edition of what I was going to say there:
First, some context
From January 3 to May 15 I tracked every hour of every day in an Excel spreadsheet. Yep, all 168 per week. Every Sunday (ideally Friday) I’d project my hours in a bunch of relevant categories that I felt would get me closer to my goals, and then over the course of the week I’d measure to see how close I came to that.
In May I switched my time tracking over to a journal format, which didn’t provide as much analysis but saved time (about 2 hours a week, I’d guess,) and it at least kept me in the mindset that my time is extremely valuable and deserves to be measured. The thinking was that I’d gained a lot from the core practice, but I wanted to shift it into maintenance mode.
As I said on Monday, I’m planning on doing the spreadsheet once a month to see what insights I can gain. Here’s some of what I learned from the last time around:
Some time can be reassigned
I found that, consistently, I was messing around in Photoshop for about 3-10 hours a week. If you’ve worked with me at all before, you’ll know that I have no business being in Photoshop. Yes, I believe that design is a skill that can be taught, but it’s not a core strength or a core necessity for me, given the number of hours it would take, so I hired a designer to take on that work. Now I have 3-10 extra hours a week that I can either bill out with my growing consulting practice, work on internal projects, or simply relax/recharge a bit. And the hours that he’s not working on my specific stuff, I can find billable work for him to do. It’s what one of my coaches called “double monetization” – monetize the time I save by delegating, and monetize the asset that comes out of that delegation.
Time can leak
Because I was using a spreadsheet instead of an automatic timer (via a desktop or smartphone app) I kept things to 15 minute increments. Then this kept happening: if I finished something at 9:10, I’d generally slack off for those extra 5 minutes to make the math easier. It got worse when I finished at 9:05…
I resisted using a timer because I (still) have a tendency to bounce a bit between tasks and then do a rough breakdown of the time later. This has gotten better over time, and the more I think about it the more a timer makes sense to drive some more of that compulsion away. I have a few ideas about why I task switch so much though, and I’d prefer to deal with some of the root causes before I impose the “cure” of a timer (more on those reasons in a later post.)
Time is finite
The “general admin” bucket kept growing as I threw more randomness in there, which I knew after reviewing but even as I did it that most of that was rationalized procrastination (I did have a “slacking” category, but maybe the way I named it caused me to resist acknowledging it…)
The fix wasn’t to focus on making that category’s number smaller, it was to make the other, more productive categories have more hours in them. Since there are only 24 hours in a day, if I spend an extra one on, say, copywriting, then it’s got to come from somewhere, and all things being equal, the catch all bucket took the hit, as intended.
All of this is hard
It’s way, way easier to skip time tracking, in any form. Tracking of anything, really. To actively monitor something means you might not like the results you get, and at the end of the day, that’s on you, so skipping out is a lot easier. Especially if nobody you know is doing this kind of thing.
The trick, for me, has been to focus on the outcomes that I want to achieve. Whether the numbers at the end of the week are good or bad, at least I know them, and I’m better able to course correct, and that’s made a world of difference this year.
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