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Managing and Tracking Your Time

Reasons for using a time log

Feeling like you don't have enough time to get things done can be very frustrating and exhausting. So it's essential to manage your time effectively. Before you can manage the time you have, you must understand what you're doing with your time now. Ask yourself two basic questions: "How much time do I have?" and "How do I spend my time?" To get a clear idea of how you use your time, create a detailed log of the way you spend the hours in your workday.

Consider using a time log to record activities you spend time on during a typical week. Include how long each activity lasts and its priority in relation to your goals. Recording and assessing your use of time in a time log will benefit you. Using a time log helps you to clarify how you use your time so you can identify any problem areas. You can then determine how best to change what you do so that you use your time more productively.

A time log shows you how much time you're really spending on activities that don't help you meet your goals. So it identifies problem areas in the way you manage your time and indicates changes you can make to be more productive. The information it provides places you in control, equipping you to manage your time better in the future.

Creating an effective time log

Creating a time log is a good first step in gaining control over your time. To do this, follow these steps:

• keep a daily log – Generally, keeping a daily log for a full working week will provide sufficient data to work with. Recording every activity right after you've completed it is important. If you don't, you may forget what you've done and you'll be guessing at how long it took. You should include even minor activities; these take up time and would be difficult to remember if you tried to create the log from memory. Ideally, the log should cover typical days rather than days that include an unusual amount of travel, long meetings, or other atypical events.
• categorize activities – As you enter each activity in the log, label it using specific categories. By creating these categories, you'll provide a simple framework that makes it easier to analyze your log later.
• prioritize activities – You should prioritize activities based on their urgency and importance in relation to your main responsibilities and goals. The next set of priorities involves enabling goals – activities that indirectly support your critical goals. These activities have a medium value and a high degree of urgency. The lowest priorities include both urgent and nonurgent tasks that have little value in relation to your goals.
• summarize data – At the end of the week, summarize the data you've gathered, adding up the total amount of time you spent on each activity category. Include the total number of hours spent on each category, the average time per day, and the priority given to that category.

Time wasters

Once you have a summary of your logged time for a week, you can begin to assess how effectively you're using the time you have. You can identify your main time wasters and, from there, decide what actions to take. It may be that you should be delegating some of your tasks or giving more time to others. Time wasters include the following:

• focusing on the wrong tasks – You may find some tasks enjoyable or feel pressured to carry out other tasks that don't help you reach your goals. You may also underestimate the time you spend on these tasks. Alternatively, you may spend a lot of time in unnecessary meetings or with unscheduled visitors to avoid being seen as rude. Then you may end up having to take work home to finish it by a deadline.
• failing to delegate – You may find that you're short on time because you do other people's work instead of managing their efforts, or because you enjoy being someone who others rely on in a crunch. If much of your time is spent helping others or doing work that isn't directly linked to your critical goals, you are probably failing to delegate. The more you do that which is not leading toward your critical goals, the less time you have to complete work that's really important, and the more stressed you will become.
• misjudging how much time an activity will take – If you misjudge how long a task will take, you may find that you spend a lot of time waiting for something to happen before you can continue working. So if your time log has long periods of waiting, or if you note that you are consistently late, you know that you have been misjudging time. You may also schedule too many tasks in a day and end up having to take work home to meet a deadline.
• procrastinating – You may procrastinate, or find yourself putting important things off until later. This can take the form of focusing on business tasks that aren't urgent or of doing things that aren't business-related at all. If you spend large parts of your day on medium- or low-priority tasks and only a small amount of time on high-priority tasks, it may be because you're procrastinating.
• socializing – Some jobs require you to be sociable. However, people often misjudge how much time they spend socializing. If you are spending large amounts of time socializing, you may battle to complete critical tasks, with the result that you feel overwhelmed and stressed.

Once you have identified your own time wasters by analyzing your summary time log, you can begin to develop strategies for avoiding them so that you use your time more effectively.

Before you can improve your use of time, you need to know how much time you have – typically eight hours in a workday – and how you currently use this time. Keeping a time log for a week and using it to record how long it takes you to complete each of the activities you perform can help you to do this. You should categorize activities and assign them priority levels so that you can create a summary of how you allocate your time over a typical week. From this summary, you can determine where you are wasting time and then address those areas.