It’s so much easier to live denial than in reality, isn’t it?
Until recently, if you asked me how much I ate I’d say: “Not too much” Or “Just a normal amount.” (Uh…hello, denial).
I didn’t realize how much food I was shoving in my mouth until I got real. Real with My Fitness Pal app and started keeping a log of everything that came in contact with my lips. (Uh…hello, reality).
I often hear similar versions of reality from clients who tell me they’re working too hard, too many hours. 50, 60, even 70 hours a week!
Really?
How much of that time is truly “work?” And how much is spent on Facebook, comparing your life and biz with others, mentally oohing and ahhing over their perfect relationships and drool-worthy vacations?
How much time is spent on writing your to-do lists? And rewriting your to-do lists? And freaking out about your to-do lists?
And marking up your planner? And highlighting your planner? And switching around sticky notes and affirmations on your planner?
Like my food and calorie intake, until you track your time for realsies, (like even the handful of M&M’s you grabbed from the reception bowl), you really don’t know where it’s going.
And here’s the big downer.
When you don’t know where your time goes, it takes a long, long time to achieve your goals.
You think you’re only spending a few minutes a day checking your phone, but all those little checks in add up to over an hour. An hour a day over a week eats up a lot of time you could be home in your jammies or enjoying happy hour.
It’s time to get real about where you’re putting your time and effort.
When you have a method of tracking your time, you come face to face with reality. This might make you cringe, (just like my food journal), but it’s actually very liberating. Here’s why.
When you’re aware of where your time goes you:
Become more intentional. You catch yourself when you’re getting distracted or going down the rabbit hole of Google searches and Pinterest boards. With your new awareness, you’ll intentionally pull yourself out of your distraction faster than you have in the past.
Get more done, quicker. With this decrease of distractions and increase of focus, you will simply get through your tasks and days quicker. Perhaps your 50 hour work week will scale back to 40. Isn’t tracking your time worth a shot?
Become a better time estimator. We tend to procrastinate the tasks we think will take a long time (we overestimate) and on the other hand, don’t plan enough time to tasks that take longer than we think (we underestimate) which makes us feel like failures. Time tracking allows you to assess and analyze more accurately so you put the right amount of time to your projects and to-do’s – which ultimately impacts your motivation.
See where you have extra time. Sometimes when you track your workday, you come to realize that you actually don’t have quite enough to do. You’re wasting time because you have the ability to do so with no real impact on your work. This could mean you could take on more…or leave early to impact other important goals in your life instead of padding your day with filler work.
How To Track Your Time
If you’re serious about making a change in your habits, working less, and feeling less scattered, here are two keys to tracking your time:
#1: Be honest. Sure you can overlook that 4 minutes you read the movie review or discount that 6-minute pit stop in your Amazon checkout cart, but what good is that doing? You’re only robbing yourself of valuable information that could potentially leave you feeling a lot less overwhelmed.
#2: Be consistent. Don’t think in hours, but in minutes. Three hours from now you won’t remember how you spent your time, nevermind even thirty minutes earlier. Detail your day by 15-minute increments for two weeks which should give you a really good indication of how your time is spent. Yes is strange at first and even a challenging to be consistent. But it’s just two weeks. You can do it.
I hate to overcomplicate things so I have three simple recommendations for tools to track your time:
- Use an excel spreadsheet or even a piece of paper that has your day broken down into 15-minute increments. Set a reminder for every 30 minutes to fill it in.
- RescueTime is a program you download that works in the background of your computer to track how much time you’re spending on websites and apps.
- Toggl is a basic web-app timer. Charts and graphs make your productivity visual, too, which is helpful.
At the end of the day, this isn’t an exercise to add one more thing to your plate, but on the contrary, to help you get the time-sucking busyness OUT of your day.
If you’re serious about wanting to make improvements in the way you spend your time in the future, you need to know how you’re spending your time in the present.
Helping ambitious people spend their time wisely and reach their goals faster is what I do best. If you want more support with this, I’d love to get to know you better. Schedule a time for us to speak right here.
Feeling scattered, overworked and undervalued is not a fun or rewarding way to live.
What if you could identify the time stealers in your day and have more time for your life goals, relationships and building a business you love?
I’ve done it and it’s not only changed how I use my minutes but also how I focus on what matters most. I hope you test this out and change your life too!
Here’s to getting more of the right things done,
Xo,
Mridu
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