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For you who prefer listening to reading, this post is also available as an episode of the ""Done!"" podcast:

I’ve had an idea

But, hand on heart, I have not had very good answers to these ques­tions. I have occa­sion­al­ly mea­sured how much time some spe­cif­ic tasks take when it has been either rel­e­vant or at all pos­si­ble to mea­sure, but I have not had the whole, com­pre­hen­sive pic­ture clear. Now I do.

A while ago I decid­ed to log every­thing I do to make it crys­tal clear what my time is spent on. For those of you who are hourly con­sul­tants, this is old news, but for me, who very rarely charges by the hour, this was some­thing new.

A use­ful app

I start­ed using the Tog­gl Track app/​service, which allows me to link the time worked to the var­i­ous projects and assign­ments of my busi­ness, and to label the time with what kind of activ­i­ty I was involved in, such as ​“email” or ​“meet­ing”. Every­thing I do, I log, which is very easy to do, as Tog­gl is avail­able on my com­put­er as well as on my phone. I make sure to always have one of these close at hand when I work.

From time to time, I take a look at Tog­gl’s excel­lent report pages, where I see how time has been divid­ed between my projects, how much I email each work­ing day, etc.

This is what I have gained

I have already gained new, valu­able insights:

• I can see that email takes only half as much time each work­day as I believed and felt it did.
• It turns out that one of my projects takes much more time than I thought, which makes me want to stream­line the work in it so that what needs to get done there gets done faster.
• I spend less time than I would like on a task that is impor­tant to my busi­ness, so I now pri­or­i­tize it more than I did before.
• If I find that I do not have time to do what I should and ​“fall behind” with pro­cess­ing emails, I can tell, after a quick look at the sta­tis­tics, that this is because I have recent­ly been more busy attend­ing meet­ings or giv­ing lec­tures than usu­al and that there is a per­fect­ly nat­ur­al expla­na­tion for this. Nice!

Get­ting clar­i­ty on how I use my time in this way helps me fine-tune how I work to an unex­pect­ed extent, which means that I now get to expe­ri­ence more work days that are much more aligned with how I like them.

Do this

If you too want to get a bet­ter pic­ture of what your time is spent on, start log­ging what you do dur­ing your work days. Note or record what you do in a tool that works for you. It can be dig­i­tal or phys­i­cal. If you want to see me talk about how I use Tog­gl, I do so in a recent video about just that (in Swedish, though).

At the end of the week, look through the entries you logged and see if you rec­og­nize a pat­tern in how the time is dis­trib­uted that makes sense to you. Are you hap­py with how it turned out or would you like to make any adjust­ments for next week?

Lit­tle by lit­tle, bit by bit, refine the way you work so that it turns out more and more the way you want it.

More accu­rate actions

If you get a more fac­tu­al pic­ture of what your time is spent on by log­ging what you do, you can make bet­ter deci­sions about how to improve your work­ing habits. You may also find your­self, like me, notic­ing a pat­tern that was not clear to you before. You will find it eas­i­er than usu­al to make time for what is impor­tant and to feel more sat­is­fied that you have done the right thing to the right extent.

What have you found?

If you log your time, what have you found or real­ized that you have not seen before? Please write and share your thoughts!

(Long­ing for more con­trol over your time? Have a look at my tips for com­pos­ing your ide­al week!)