The Secret of Time Tracking

I read this article on cognitive dissonance and there’s a quote that goes:

“If you’ve never tracked yourself, you don’t even know how much power there is in tracking. I couldn’t even explain it adequately. You wouldn’t believe me. You’d think I was exaggerating.” — Sebastian Marshall

There are two currencies that I’ve been tracking very closely for years — time and money. I use Spending to track my income and expenses, which has done wonders for me (more on this another time). And I use Fathm to track my time.

I began when I first became a Merchant of Time. I had joined an accountability group where we track the time we spend at various professional activities. I found the practice to have great benefits as it uncovered important patterns and trends about where I spend most of my time.

In time (no pun intended), I decided to track ALL of my time, except that which I spend sleeping because that tends to screw up the results, since we spend one third of our lives in bed. This is my time chart for last month:

I broke down my life into three main areas:

1. Work: Red represents professional activities that are directly related to income generation. Yellow represents professional activities that are necessary but not linked to income generation. Violet represents other activities that are also income generating, but are not my core business.
2. Relationships: This includes time spent with my wife, parents, and friends. The darkest colour is the most important relationship.
3. Personal: This represents “me time”, used for exercise, spiritual, errands, and other recreational activities.

From this chart, I can see that my life is well-balanced (at least for last month). I spent equal parts of my time in all three segments which are the areas that I want to focus on in this season of my life.

“What gets measured gets improved.”

Time tracking is important to me because it’s a matter of accountability. As a self-employed person, time is currency. It is the currency I trade for income. It is the currency I use to build relationships. It is also the currency I spend on enjoying my life.

Similar to money, which I’m always looking for opportunities to increase, I’m also always on the lookout for ways to increase my time. That’s why I’m so into productivity.

The two principles of productivity I live by are automation and delegation. Automation saves me small pockets of time. Delegation saves me large pockets of time. Both of these things allow me to get much more done and create time for me to spend with the people who are most important to me.

I believe in quality time, but I also believe in quantifying my time. After all, no matter how much I multiply it, I still have finite time. Tracking it shows me if I’m using that time wisely and efficiently, and it shows me the positive or negative results when I implement tweaks to my systems.

I’ve experimented with various time tracking methods and this are three important lessons I’ve learnt:

1. Tracking must be measured against your goals

There are people who track the weather. Every day, they record the temperature and quality of air. But nothing gets done as a result of that kind of tracking. It is merely a record from which the data can later be analysed. Good, but not good enough.

When I track my time, I’m not doing it just for fun. There must be tangible results from this activity, otherwise it’s a waste of my time and focus.

My first time tracking system was completely manual. I kept in my pocket a pen and an index card. At the top of the index card, I wrote down the most important and urgent tasks I needed to complete each day. (I have another system called IXU which I will share at another time.)

When I track my time, what I’m really measuring is how much of my time was spent geared towards completing those tasks which, in turn, moved me closer to achieving my goals. Thus I was able to select the best method of time tracking. That leads me to the next lesson.

2. Active Tracking trumps Passive Tracking

Every time I started an activity, I’d record it down. Every time I switched activities, I’d also record it down. If something came up in the course of the day, I’d measure it against my to-do list on the index card and decide which was more important to get done first.

At the end of the day, I’d tabulate the number of minutes I spent on each activity.

The very act of having to record down a change in activity was a deterrent to getting distracted. It kept me singularly focused on the most important task I had to do at hand. This was an extremely productive method.

Later on, I switched to using apps in line with automation. It is still important that I manually recording the switching of activities (I call this Active Tracking). There are some apps that automatically track what you’re doing on the computer, such as RescueTime. I call this Passive Tracking.

I tried it for a while, but all it could do was tell me that I got distracted. There was no way of it helping me to not get distracted, which is what the Active Tracking does.

That’s why Active Tracking trumps Passive Tracking.

3. Tracking data must be analysed

There are some people who track, but do not analyse. This is stupid, because it completely defeats the purpose of tracking. It is like a person who records the weather every day, acquires a huge amount of data, but does not do anything with it.

Time tracking on a daily basis should help us move closer to your goals. The data acquired from the tracking should also allow us to analyse our activities and come up with meaningful results as to whether or not we’re making the good use of our time.

There’s a quote attributed to Socrates that goes: “The unexamined life is not worth living.” Drawing a parallel, I would say:

“Unanalysed data is not worth tracking.”

So basically the cycle goes like this: Track data -> Gather data -> Analyse data -> Tweak system -> Track data

In this way, I’m always improving, bit by bit. You can too. I’ll end off with the quote I started with:

“If you’ve never tracked yourself, you don’t even know how much power there is in tracking. I couldn’t even explain it adequately. You wouldn’t believe me. You’d think I was exaggerating.” — Sebastian Marshall

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