Should you track your time? Why & how? When you look deep into the face of the productivity dragon, you will find that almost everyone tells you the same thing. You need to track your time. By this, I mean you need to go beyond the simple time tracking that you might do to ‘punch in’ and ‘punch out’. Logging the total number of hours that you put in during the day. I mean tracking how you use your time during the working day. So, logging that you spent 20 minutes checking e-mails, that you spent 38 minutes on the phone to your boss. Some time tracking apps even have built in icons implying that you could and indeed should be tracking your bathroom breaks!
Should you track your time? Yes but be careful with it. Firstly, depending on your profession and work, you might need to accurately track time spent working for specific clients in order to bill them accurately. This is normal. But what about the rest of us that don’t have this kind of role? Tracking your time can give you valuable data that can help you waste less time on useless stuff and it can lead you to being more conscious of where your time is actually going. That said, it can be rabbit hole of collecting useless information that doesn’t really benefit you.
Should you track your time?
What is of actual benefit?
There are two benefits of tracking your time.
- To help you be realistic in planning. There is no point in planning in a 10 minute slot to process your e-mails or call your boss, if tracking data tells you that a call with your boss routinely lasts for 40 minutes and the normal time required to deal with e-mail is 30 minutes.
- It helps you identify wasted time. This could be in the form of helping you to better batch things together better. It could help you identify points of the day or week where things take longer than normal and help you investigate the why of this. It could identify tasks that you are spending longer on them they are actually worth and so give you a prompt to make some decisions about how and if they are done.
- In my case, once upon a time, I identified that I was spending far too much time planning my week and my day and cut this down significantly as a result.
For these two reasons alone, I track my time.
How to track your time effectively
Here is how I do it, and I explain, we start with some cautions:
- I’m not obsessive about it. If I forget it’s not a disaster. I’m not aiming for a complete record or everything I have done but the broad information outlined above.
- I do not use an automated tracker. These are apps that log information about the software you are using, the websites you visit etc etc. They do this automatically in the background. The purpose of apps like these is to tell you things like – yes you had Word open for 2 hours but in that 2 hours you actually spent 38 minutes on twitter and facebook. This can be useful if this is a problem for you. For me, his would just give me useless information.
- Generally speaking I log the projects I am working on and not the individual tasks. Sometimes I might log tasks as part of a bigger project if the project is of a size that I feel this is warrented.
- I use an app called Toggl Track for this – the free version. I have tried Clockify and Working Hours. Both are good but Toggl just has a nicer look, feel and interface and is a bit snappier.
So there you have it – track your time, but don’t obsess over it.
