Totally agree, Jon.

About a year ago myself & a friend started consciously working towards a goal of starting our own business. For us that meant no more gaming, a minimal at best social life, and a challenge to launch six projects in six months.

Now, a year on, we’ve completed that challenge and seeing our time as an investment was a big part of that. To track our investment we turned to time tracking, naturally, and tracked every piece of work we did.

In the last year, we’ve spent over 1,225 hours on side projects (between the two of us), with the great majority of these seeing no immediate financial return.

For each project launch, we exported our time reports and included those in our write ups, so people could see where our time was invested. We even took that a step further and started publishing how long each blog post took us to write & edit (p.s. it can be quite embarrassing sharing these details when you’re not the quickest writer).

All in, I’m in total agreement that we need to start using our time proactively, choosing to take back our day however we can to achieve the goals we want, whether they be business or leisure.

A couple weeks back I published a post sharing how I spend 1 whole month each year commuting. About six months back I started a new job up in London, about an hour and a half away from home. The daily commute, logically, was 3 hours, 15 hours a week, ~60 hours a month, and ~660 a year (11 months). For me, commuting has been great as it’s forced me to invest my time each day.

Worryingly though, I see so many other commuters wasting away their time, I’d hate to be in their shoes when their time draws near and they wonder, where did all that time go?