To be more productive, you need to manage your time effectively. How do you get better at managing your time? No matter where you are with your time-management skills, the very first thing you need to do is track how you spend your time currently. You can't change how you spend your time if you don't know how you use it now.
There are three primary ways to track your time, and each one has pros and cons. The way that's generally thought to be the easiest is the least accurate. The one that's the most accurate is very time-consuming. Finally, there's a way to track your time using technology, which is extremely easy, but only accurate for certain kinds of tasks. These methods can help whether you're in the office or working from home.
Here's what you need to know about those three methods:
1. Time Estimate (Also Known as Work Week Estimate Method)
What is a time estimate? A time estimate is a list of everything you did during a period of time alongside how many hours and minutes you estimate that you spent doing it.
How to make a time estimate: Time estimates are often done at the end of a week. You think back on your week, or whatever look-back period you want, and tally up how many hours you believe you worked, slept, ran errands, cooked, cleaned, or watched movies, for example. It helps to consult your calendar for guidance, if you keep one.
Pros: Time estimates take very little time to create. Since you can save them until the end of the week, your daily routine isn't interrupted by pesky time-logging tasks.
Cons: Time estimates are the least accurate way to measure how you spend your time. Researchers have found that when people estimate how they spend their time using a look-back approach, they often end up with a total of more hours than there are in an actual week (168). People tend to overestimate how much they work and underestimate their leisure time.
2. Time Log (Also Lnown as Total Time Diary Approach)
What is a time log? A time log is a record of what you did all day, split up over blocks of time that account for the whole day. The idea is to account for every block of time in a 24-hour period.
How to make a time log: To make a time log, you need little more than a sheet of paper or a spreadsheet. Create a column and enter into it consecutive blocks of time in increments of 15, 30, or 60 minutes. You can combine multiple time blocks for the hours when you're usually asleep. Either periodically throughout the day or at the end of the day, you fill in the space next to each time block with what you were doing during that time. How specific you get with your description depends on what you want to know about yourself or what kind of time-management transformation you want to do.
Pros: Time logs are more accurate than time diaries. They're more so when you fill them in more often and less so the longer you wait to complete them. It's very easy to classify your time into categories, add up the numbers, and analyze the results.
Cons: Jotting down one answer for what you did between, say, 9 and 10 a.m. may not be a realistic reflection of how you really used that hour. Let's say you worked. Did you leave your desk and get a drink of water during that time? Did you make a quick phone call? Did you read news online for a few minutes halfway through your work? Time logs generalize about blocks of time without getting into the real detail of what you were doing.
3. Time-Tracking Apps
What is a time-tracking app? A time-tracking app is software you use to track how much time you spend doing different things, mostly on your computer and phone. There are passive time-tracking apps and active ones. Passive ones, such as RescueTime, measure how much time you spend in different applications and on different websites. Active time-tracking apps, such as Toggl, give you a timer on screen that runs while you work, so you can use multiple apps and websites while working on one task.
How to use a time-tracking app: With a passive time tracker, you install it on your computer or mobile device and simply let it run. It automatically captures all your activity to record, categorize, tally, and analyze it. Usually, you can pause these apps whenever you like, and you can set them to turn off during times that you don't want to track your activity. Active timers rely on you to push a button to start and stop them. They let you enter information about what you were doing while it was running, and the app automatically adds that information to a record, which you can view and further analyze any time you want. Mobile app versions of active time trackers can be useful for letting you run a timer when you're in meetings, traveling for work, and doing other non-computer work that you want to measure.
There are some time-tracking mobile apps that monitor your location and supposedly help you classify your time that way, but they're not very smart yet and require way too much manual entry to be of much value at this time. Maybe someday they'll improve.
Pros: Time-tracking apps are excellent when it comes to giving you detail about your digital activities. They have tools for categorizing your time and spitting out charts and graphs. The best of them are very easy to use and most of them have a free option.
Cons: Time-tracking apps give you a rich analysis of what you do on your computer, but they aren't made to track all your time, so they'll miss your hours spent folding laundry, cooking, reading, playing with your kids or pets, or whatever else you do.
Track for Two Weeks, Then Analyze
If you're new to time tracking, I recommend combining the time log method with a time-tracking app. That way, you can get an overview of how you spend all the hours in your day plus a detailed analysis of your computer time.
You'll want to log your time for at least two weeks before analyzing it. During the first one or two days, you may change your behavior slightly because you're thinking about the fact that you're tracking your time. Your behavior will go back to normal quickly.
Also, if you find yourself saying, "Oh, that day shouldn't count because it was highly unusual," stop. The more you track your time, the more you'll realize you have more unusual days than you probably realized. The idea is to better understand how you actually spend your time, not what an average day is. Once you know how you spend your time overall, you can start making informed decisions about what you want to do more of, less of, or if you want to start doing something entirely new.