In This Episode…
At the end of the third week where I have been tracking my time to see how my focus is spread across my commitments, I share the results. There are some impressive gains that are there JUST because I am tracking my time.
Edited Transcript
Hi, this is Michael Tipper and welcome to today’s episode of the Profit Productivity podcast.
It’s the end of another week and I’m just reviewing my time log from the past week. This has been the third week where I’ve tracked everything I’ve been doing from the moment I wake up to the moment I go to sleep – Monday to Friday.
Now my reason for doing that is I want to understand where am I spending my time – what is my focus being drawn to over the course of a week?
I’ve been very rigid in capturing everything I’ve been doing. It’s become a habit over the three weeks to the extent when I don’t do it on a Saturday and Sunday, I feel like my focus has been diluted and has been watered down.
It’s been really interesting to notice that in me. By continually tracking what happens every time I change my activity, it has made me much more aware of what I’m doing.
Over this week, things have evolved in what I have been capturing. I began adding more categories. For example, this week I’ve added in how often I check social media.
I’ve also added how often I’m spending socialising with friends. Now the reason why that’s important is because the I’m becoming more sensitive to developing a more balanced life. I realised my past has been about working with my nose to the grindstone and just work, work, work. Often this has been at the expense of a more balanced life.
One of the key aspects of a balanced life is good social contact with people who you like being around. So I started tracking that. Next week I’ll start tracking the time I take gong for a walk. So my exercise activity includes yoga in the morning, but also I get my 12,500 steps a day whenever I can.
I’m going to start tracking when I do that, how long I do that for and what else I do whilst I’m doing that (e.g. Listening to podcasts or making phone calls).
Let’s look at the results for the last three weeks.
The most striking development for me is this. In the first week of tracking my time I discovered I only spent three hours and 16 minutes on a project related to furthering my business. In the second week that went up to five hours but this week it’s gone up to 14 hours and 45 minutes.
That’s an absolute massive leap.
That means I am working on a specific project that’s going to grow my business for nearly 15 hours this week. That is dedicated time focusing just on that project.
I haven’t included the time it takes me to put together record, edit and plan a podcast in those figures. If I add that into the figure as well, what I’ve seen is that my constructive work, that’s valuable work value adding work to my business has grown as a proportion of the time I spend during the week.
In the first week, it was just under 20% (19.4%) of my waking hours for the week. In the second week it was 23% and this week it’s gone up to 31.79%.
So it’s gone up from just under a fifth to just under a third in the space of only three weeks.
I didn’t set targets for that. So what’s happened?
Well I’ve just become more aware and more conscious of where I’m spending my time especially when it’s not adding value to my short term goals. And so my activity has naturally shifted towards the things I know add value.
I’m going to keep tracking my time and see how this evolves because I am getting so much from doing it.
I’d strongly recommend you at least explore the possibility of doing it yourself.
Until tomorrow.
POST SCRIPT – Much has moved on since this episode. In episode 063 I share my results after tracking my time for 9 weeks.
