A 3-minute practice that will make you 10x more productive
This quick exercise will dramatically cut down how much time you waste.
My name is Nick Brown, and I am an addict. I am addicted to my iPhone. I am addicted to Instagram. I am addicted to Snapchat. I am addicted to Bumble. I am not yet addicted to HQ Trivia.
They say the first step in addiction recovery is acceptance of the problem.
I first realized I had an addiction to my smartphone when I began logging every single hour of my day. It happened when I read a book recommended by Tim Ferriss called The Effective Executive. It was written in the 60s by a distinguished business management author named Peter Drucker. He writes:
“The effective executive…knows that to manage his time, he first has to know where it actually goes.”
Drucker notes that some executives keep track of their hours themselves, constantly updating the log every hour or two. Others have their secretaries do it. Some do it for a few weeks at a time at least twice a year. Others do it more frequently, and adjust their schedules based on what is actually productive in their log.
For me, I realized that making a Perfect Day Itinerary (which I showed readers how to do in a previous article), and also recording an Actual Day Log side-by-side would show me where I was wasting time.
It’s really simple to do. If you already do something like this, then skip to the third step.
First, draw a blank Perfect Day Itinerary diagram like this (I like to use pen and paper to avoid looking at my iPhone or computer upon waking up).
Second, fill it in with your ideal schedule (this technique comes from Lewis Howes book School of Greatness). This is going to vary on a day-by-day basis, and may change even throughout the day itself. That is totally fine. The idea is you write what you want to accomplish in the hours of the day you are awake. Here’s my schedule from today, which is a lot of end of year accounting meetings and 2018 financial meetings.
Third, you’re going to make a similar looking list, but this is not your perfect day. This is your Actual Day Log. No cheating. Write in your times. Then, write down what you actually did throughout the day, and see how much time you waste. It’s wild. In my first log, I noticed that I was wasting an hour and 45 minutes scrolling through Instagram and swiping on dating apps. That’s about 10% of my waking hours. That’s so much time. And while it’s totally fine to have downtown, I could have used it so much more productively. So, below you’ll see my log from my first day of keeping one, and my log from today. You’ll notice that today, I wasted about 45 minutes on Instagram and Twitter and some other apps, which gives me a full hour to do something productive, like write this Medium article.
My first Actual Time Log or Actual Day Log
(Name it whatever you want!)
Look at all that wasted time on the bottom, especially reading pointless stuff on social media. I found Twitter to be the biggest time suck, as you just get pulled into people’s arguments. Do you really think they’re going to solve big policy debates by arguing anonymously on the Internet? Yea… Me neither. Move on!
My day log from today! One hour less of wasted time. The time I wasted is boxed.
So, just by taking three minutes a day to write down what I’m doing, I’m saving about an hour of time. I’ve found that to be consistent. I was really addicted to technology, especially images on Instagram and fights on Twitter before. Now, I’m considerably less addicted.
I have saved about an hour a day by becoming more disciplined, and keeping this journal. That Return on Investment is crazy high. Bitcoin high.
For every minute I spend logging what I’m doing, I turn 20 minutes of wasted time into productive time. Put it in $1 dollar, get out $20. I’ll take that every time.
THANKS FOR READING!
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Then, let’s connect on social media:
Here’s my Instagram, Facebook and Twitter.
And let’s try not to waste too much time on pointless things on those apps. We can get our dopamine rushes elsewhere.
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