Last week, inspired by Laura Vanderkam’s book, Off the Clock, I tracked everything I did every 15 minutes for seven days. Needless to say, it was quite eye-opening! In this post, I’ll share what I learned…
First off, I have to say that I have heard of the idea of time tracking for years. But up until I started listening to Off the Clock, I was not convinced it was worth the effort. It just felt like a lot of extra busywork.
If you’ve followed here for awhile, you probably know that I use a hybrid of Google Calendar + a Daily Time-Blocked To Do List to stay on track. I’m fairly efficient and productive by nature and tend to have a pretty high capacity and accomplish quite a bit most days.
While listening to Off the Clock and hearing Laura talk about how beneficial it can be to actually see and track what we’re doing every minute of every day, instead of just going by what we feel or think we probably are doing most of the day. I was curious if tracking my time would reveal areas where I could improve or if it would just be a lot of time spent filling in little rectangles on a paper for a week! I wouldn’t know until I actually tried time tracking, would I?
My philosophy is, “Don’t knock it until you’ve tried it!” So I downloaded my trackers and got started. Here’s what I learned:
1. Overall, I use my time pretty wisely.
I was encouraged overall by this exercise. I realized that my Google Calendar + Time-Blocked To Do List Method really does help me to (mostly) maximize my time each day so that I’m not frittering away hours or spending a lot of time on things that are just mindless. The majority of my day is focused on areas that are my priorities. This was good to know and a very positive outcome of this exercise.
2. I spend a lot of time on Instagram.
Okay, but the surprising result of tracking was how much time I spend on Instagram. I love Instagram, it’s a big part of our business strategy, and it brings in a lot of income for us. But I still was really shocked to add up the hours and realize how much time I was spending on Instagram in a week!
3. I check Instagram more than I realized.
How to Get Your Free Time Trackers
Laura Vanderkam offers free time tracking downloads on her site when you sign up for her email newsletter. You’ll get a 15-minute tracker and a 30-minute tracker — and you’ll have them in PDF, Google Sheets, and an Excel file. Pick which one works best for you. Or, pick the one you think will work for you, stick with that for a week, and if that doesn’t work, try another one!
I chose to use the 15-minute PDF because I’m more of a pen and paper girl and really avoid spreadsheets if I can help it. (Although I have to admit that the fact that Laura has tracked her time for months and months on spreadsheets and can tell you exactly how much time she spends on pretty much every single category of her life is pretty inspiring! It almost made me want to reconsider my “I don’t do spreadsheets” stance… just because it would be really cool to have those stats!)
One thing I quickly learned is that tracking your time in 15-minute increments means you do a lot of tracking. I mean, 15 minutes goes by pretty quickly! This week, I’ve been using the 30-minute spreadsheet and it feels more doable. However, it also feels like I sometimes have a lot to put into each line because you can fit a lot of little tasks into 30 minute increments!
Have you ever tried tracking your time? If so, I’d love to hear what you learned from it!
