Assess Yourself

The first step to effective time management is self-awareness.

You probably have a general sense of what types of tasks you perform on a daily basis, and how much time you spend on each. But perception isn’t always reality, and you may overestimate or underestimate, and any blind spots you have won’t help. Those miscalculations can add up and leave you with an incomplete picture of where your time is going.

That’s why it’s important to actually track your time. For a week or two, keep a log of the tasks that you perform and how much time you spend working on each. This chapter will show you how to put together a tracking plan and log that works for you.

It’s true that time tracking can feel like busywork, but the minutes you spend on it can be kept to a minimum and it’s the best way to get a clear and detailed account of how you’ve spent—and wasted—your time. The more aware you become of your habits, the more data you will have to make better time-management plans and decisions going forward.

State your objectives

Before you begin tracking your activities, identify the reason you’re going through this exercise. What do you want to accomplish by better managing your time? This question may seem too simple to spend much time on (you don’t have any time, after all!), but it’s important because your answer will inform your efforts and serve as your metric for success. If you know where you want to end up, it’s a lot easier to figure out how to get there.

Your goal could be personal or professional. You may have a new project that you want to make time for, a skill you want to acquire, or a performance metric your boss wants you to reach. Or you may want to stop missing deadlines set by your colleagues—or by your manager. Perhaps you want to stop feeling so much pressure to stay late and work when you could be home with your family. It may be a combination of these. Just make sure that your own goal as you state it matches up with those that your manager has set for you.

Break down your responsibilities

You’ll want to make the time-tracking process as simple, painless, and manageable as possible.

To do this, break down your job duties into broad categories—for example, personal growth, employee management, core responsibilities, administrative work—and then track the amount of time that you spend doing tasks in each category. It’s easier and more efficient than logging every single task that you spend time on.

You can also break down your duties along other lines, depending on the types of problems you face. If you work in a deadline-intensive environment, for example, you could break down your workload into short-term, long-term, and urgent tasks. Or by priority level: high, medium, low. We’ll assume you’re using the broad category method for the sake of this book, but any of these will work.

While it’s more labor intensive, it may be beneficial to track your activities at a more detailed level for a week or two. You’ll put more time into the tracking, but you’ll be rewarded with more pockets of inefficient time that you uncover as a result of that detailed accounting. If, on the other hand, there’s one category that’s been a pain point for you—say, you seem to be spending an inordinate amount of time on administrative tasks—you may want to track only that category.

Here are some typical categories to track.

• Core responsibilities. These are the day-to-day tasks that make up the crux of your job. For a book editor, for example, core responsibilities include editing manuscripts and corresponding with authors. If you were at a party, and someone asked you what your day-to-day work entails, what would you say? The types of activities you would describe are most likely your core responsibilities.

• Personal growth. This category consists of the activities and projects that you find valuable, meaningful, and fulfilling but that may not be part of your everyday responsibilities. It could be a big project you’ve taken on, or a skill you’d like to learn. In a perfect world, most people would choose to devote a lot more time, focus, and energy to these activities because they contribute most to their career and personal development.

If you’re feeling in a rut careerwise and aren’t progressing as fast as you’d like, this is the best category to track. Do the same if you want to carve out time to learn a new skill.

• Managing people. Do you have any direct reports? Do you work collaboratively with colleagues? Lead a team? If so, the amount of time that you spend managing people—that team, your colleagues, even your superiors—should be logged here.

If you feel that people issues are taking up a large chunk of your time, you could break this category down into smaller subcategories such as managing up (your boss and other superiors), managing across (your peers), and managing your direct reports.

• Administrative tasks. These are the necessary chores you perform each day: emails, time sheets, expense reports, approving invoices, and so forth.

• Crises and fires. Interruptions. Urgent matters. Unplanned meetings. Last-minute issues that need to be dealt with right away can sabotage even the best time-management plans. That’s why they’re particularly critical to track. Although you won’t ever be able to anticipate when they’re going to happen, if you can identify some patterns—for example, that you spend five hours a week on average putting out fires—you can plan accordingly.

• Free time. This may not be an official part of your duties, but everyone needs to take breaks from work. Lunch, a walk, a coffee pit-stop, a chat with a coworker, personal email, the internet—in small doses, these can unclutter your mind and even increase collaboration and productivity. But if you’re not careful, these brief respites can add up.

As you break down your responsibilities, think carefully about what a typical day looks like at your job. You may find that you want to supplement or replace some of the categories above with some that are more specific to your role.

Track your time

Once you have your categories in place, you can build your time-tracking tool. If you’re a pen-and-paper type of person, the tool described below should work well for you. If you’re more digitally oriented, there are a host of time-tracking programs and apps that make the process simpler by doing most of the work and math for you. Either way, the same principles are at work and it’s important to understand them.

Whether you decide to track one category or fifteen, it’s important to be as diligent as possible. Log every hour. As you begin, you will want the most accurate and detailed data possible. Frankly, this can be a pain: Nobody wants to take time out of their busy schedule to remind themselves of how busy they are. But the more effort you put into time tracking, the more confident you’ll be in your results and the more likely that you’ll find a solution to your problem.

Here’s how to build your time-tracking tool:

1. At the very start of a workweek, create a time chart as in table 1. Devote a row for each day of the week and a column for each broad category.

2. Just after you complete a task, write down how long it took you to finish it. If you spent an hour on Tuesday morning responding to emails, for example, record that in the Administrative Tasks column, and so on.

TABLE 1

3. At the end of each day, take five minutes or so to tally the total amount of time that you spent on each activity. Do the same at the end of the week as well.

4. Next, calculate the percentage of your workweek that you spent on each activity.

5. Finally, visualize the results by creating a pie chart (figure 1). (You easily can do so using Excel’s chart functions.) You’ll be able to see which activities are taking up the biggest chunk of your time.

FIGURE 1

Examine your results

As you go, be on the lookout for patterns and habits: Identifying these is the point of the exercise. Most likely, your results don’t align with the objectives you outlined initially. Maybe you’ll realize that you’re spending much more time on administrative tasks than you thought you were, wasting too much time socializing with colleagues, or devoting far less time developing a new strategy for your business unit than you’d like. Perhaps you thought you weren’t spending that much time on a particular category, but you really are. Or it could be the other way around: You bemoan how much time you spend on a particular task but you’ve just realized that it’s not that much compared with your other categories. You may find that you’re spending more time than you expected on non-work-related activities.

You may also have uncovered some more nuanced patterns and habits as well. Say you tend to unwind for 30 minutes after a meeting, or you often get drawn into overly long conversations by a chatty colleague, or your productivity tends to tail off each day around 3 p.m.

Recognizing patterns large and small will inform the kinds of changes you will make in how you spend your time.

If you have the flexibility, you can use this data to make more creative and well-informed decisions about what to do with your time. Even if you have little to no control over your day-to-day schedule, it can help you structure a get-real conversation with your manager. Numbers help: If you can show her that you are spending 10 hours a week on a task that isn’t a strategic priority, she may be able to help you shift your responsibilities.

Unearthing these issues means that you know where to shift your priorities and where to make improvements. Now you need a plan to help make that happen.