How to Track Your Time To Manage Better

I have grown more aware of the passage of time over the years. Not just in the sense of growing older, but as a manager my time gets split between multiple foci.

As a team member I typically had one or two tasks or priorities. At the end of the day I generally knew what I had done.

As a manager I have more priorities, more 'things' on the go, a broader view of the work going on. If I don't have a good handle on that then I start to question if I really know the activities and work done on a project.

A result of this:

• I plan my day,


• I track my day,


• I evaluate my day.

I have changed the way I do this over the years, and I will continue changing this as each project has different needs, each company I work for has different tools and I learn to track what I do better.

I shall describe my experiences with, and with not, tracking time.

Calendar & ToDo

I used to rely on a calendar and a todo list.

I also kept an unstructured notebook - i.e. it would sometimes have dates and sometimes not, it would get very very messy.

I eventually found this too static, while I knew what I had planned to do, and I could see what I had done (that I had planned on 'To Do' list), I didn't have a handle on the variation taking place:

• what meetings finished early?


• what overran?


• what happened in that gap in the calendar?


• how did I implement that ToDo?


• did I 'do' that 'to' in a contiguous action or in disparate pieces?


• What context surrounded that splitting of work?


• What led me to split that up?


• Could I have planned that that split would happen?

I didn't have a basis for evaluating these questions in order to 'get better'.

Better use of Calendar & ToDo

So, sticking with the ToDo and Calendar notion I started to print out my daily calendar and physically mark on it the main aims and todos of the day that I would focus on in addition to the daily planned activities.

By doing this I could see the variation during the day, the meetings that got shifted and cancelled, what took their place, which todos got done on a day and which got moved to the next day.

The printout nature meant that I could write down notes on 'next actions' what we did, what decisions I made. Coupled with this, my physical notebook where each date had a heading with any notes that I made during that day so I could have a persistent record of my thoughts as I went through.

But I lacked the ability to easily track this variation and work done in a report format to 'see' actual numbers for how much time went on different acts.

Use of a Time Tracking Tool

So I started to use the JWorksheet tool. (EvilTester.com review)

I like a number of things about this -

• The discipline of tracking what I did with 'actual' times.


• The forced pre-thinking to create projects and tasks and decide how I want to categorise my time.


• The ability to generate reports of where I split my time. I can then check that those splits match up with the priorities that I have decided on for those tasks and projects.

Dislike:

• I can't put enough information into the tasks to describe exactly what I did.


• I can't tie up variation in time in terms of what I planned to have happen so I still have to keep a notebook log to track that variation.

I don't know of a perfect time tracking tool - if you know of one then leave a comment and let me know.

JWorksheet works they way I currently work, so I find it useful.

Dangers I have found with this approach? The creation of too many categories.

I created so many tasks for so many projects that eventually my list became unmanageable. The solution? Only record what you want to measure. Identify the actions and projects that you care about, that you need to/want to report on. Trim out those that you don't.

What if I went back to my old habits?

As an experiment I decided to go back to my old ways for a week and just use a calendar and todo list. I found myself lost at the end of a day and didn't really know what I had done, I had 'tracked' things (done, some work (i.e. meetings or blocks of time) but didn't know how I had 'actioned' them (what I had done on them).

After the 2nd day I couldn't take it any more. I have no idea how I worked like that in the past. I had no visiblity into my thought process or learning or the actual progress on tasks.

Doubts?

When I started the logging process I thought it might take too much time. I thought that I would spend my whole time, tracking what I did and managing my time tracking than I would actually doing stuff.

The things I feared did not manifest. Instead the reverse happened. Minimal time spent logging. I then spent less time wastefully thinking - did we do that? did we do enough? what decision did we make? I did not clutter up my head with that information and could more clearly identify what "next thing" needed doing.

Summary

It takes discipline to write down what you have done. You can develop and learn this over time. I recommend this practice. I can't recommend it highly enough.

I read a fair few 'productivity' books to see what other people recommend but if anyone reading this blog entry has some immediate tips that they want to pass on then I shall gratefully receive them.