In This Episode…
This is probably the most important episode so far of the Profit Productivity Podcast. Keeping an accurate and comprehensive time log for at least a week and then analysing the results is something I’ve been recommending in my Getting More Done Seminar for years now. I am revisiting it again for myself and in this episode I explain why. I also share how I did it and what I discovered. Not only that, you’ll get to understand why I am gladly going to be doing it again this week!
Episode Show Notes
00:21 – Background on how I’ve used Time Tracking in my seminars in the past
02:11 – How effective was your use of your time last week? Do you know?
03:00 – When you have the data about how you used your time, the numbers don’t lie!
03:47 – If I’ve done this exercise before, why am I doing it again now?
05:33 – How I captured the data and how that changed over the week.
06:27 – I tracked absolutely EVERYTHING!
07:45 – Recording my morning routine – what I captured and why I went into so much detail.
08:44 – Recording this podcast – why I broke down the different activities and recorded them separately instead of lumping them together.
10:44 – What I did at the end of the week to analyse the data I’d captured about my activities.
10:58 – The categories I chose and why I chose them.
12:51 – An embarrassing admission of something I captured – I very nearly edited this out of the recording!
13:51 – I colour coded the analysis to make it easier to understand. Though actually this was pandering to my natural desire to make spreadsheets look colourful!
14:38 – I review the activities of one day to show you what it revealed to me.
15:44 – The power in the analysis comes from looking at all the data for an entire week.
16:24 – A breakdown of the activities I spent the longest time on.
17:19 – The numbers reveal something I’m not happy about at all!
18:28 – The numbers reveal something I’m quite happy about, but perhaps I shouldn’t be!
20:02 – I spent more time doing basic business admin last week than I did on projects to move my business forward!
20:30 – This exercise has been so useful to me this week that I am doing it again next week!
20:42 – I encourage you to track how you use your time for at least 5 days because of the benefits it has given me.
21:27 – A story about a manager who attended one of my seminars and discovered he was spending more time that he felt was necessary with one member of his team and what he did about it.
POST SCRIPT – Much has moved on since this episode. In episode 063 I share my results after tracking my time for 9 weeks.
