How Keeping Track of What I Do Every Day Has Helped Me Find a Better Work-Life Balance
There are two types of people in this world: those who like to keep track of what they do with their time throughout the day, and the rest of us who prefer to watch the paint dry. I used to be in the last group … until I found myself doing it all wrong.
This is very important for me, as a person who hates even thinking about time. (Seriously, don’t talk to me about time travel movies.) I’d rather dive into a project, work without being distracted from the outside world, and somehow get out of this stupor by doing something. I know this is not the case for many jobs, and not even feasible with flexible working hours. The danger with this time-ignoring approach is that it works too hard and burns out – things I run into a lot.
I’ve tried many time tracking apps in the past , but even the simplest ones seemed like torture to me. Even the automatic time tracking tool RescueTime, which can provide tons of insights into your productivity , did nothing for me, perhaps because it only tracks the time on the computer and I crave a more holistic view, not just how productive I am. I’m at the keyboard, but how well am I using my time in general. When it came to time tracking and time management, I thought I was just a lost cause.
That all changed for me about five months ago when I started using a productivity planner called Passion Planner . I got it primarily to help me write down my goals and break them down into tasks for the year. Surprisingly, it helped me get started and enjoy time tracking.
How I keep track of my time in Planner
In all fairness, any weekly or daily planner would work. It has a large two-page spread for each week, where each day is divided by half an hour. It is designed for meetings, events and other schedules, but my days are boringly eventless. (In any case, I would have preferred to have events in a digital calendar.) Rather than using space to allocate time in the future, I decided to start writing down what I did after each important task. And since I’m a nerd, I bought some nicely colored markers and Japanese planner stickers to code the colors and create my days.
I try to work with concentration (usually 90 minutes). After each block or before taking a break, I write down what I have done and highlight it according to my categories (work, home / family, exercise / life support, part-time work, creative projects and friends / walks). That’s all. While this is not an original or thoughtful concept, this tracking method actually works for me and has been working for many months, when previous attempts failed miserably.
It works for me because:
- It’s quick and easy. I just keep my day planner open on my desk and it takes me a second to write the task down. As simple as time tracking apps are, they take too many steps to add a block of time in the past or in the future.
- It’s tactile. As silly as it sounds, there is a small but subtle pleasure in using a marker or even adding a sticker to a page. (I’m stingy with stickers though.)
- It’s colorful. Again, these are little things. On days when I forgot or was too busy to keep a journal, those empty white columns are a sad reprimand. It’s like nothing happened in all these days, even though I know something was going to happen, so I have the motivation to keep tracking.
- It’s actually nice , I never thought I’d say about keeping an eye on every half hour every day.
How time tracking improves my daily life
More importantly, time tracking helped me think more clearly about how I spend my time. I immediately see where I am spending too much time in one area and not enough time in another, and I also find patterns in my behavior.
For example, I had a freelance project that I estimated should have taken only 2.5 hours, but in my weekly review, I saw big green squares scattered throughout this week (in hindsight, I didn’t have any tools from a client. which I needed to make this project as fast as it should be). I was also extremely honest with myself, recording the days when I slept little due to sleep delay, and found that the following days required longer work sessions and more breaks. (You know it’s bad when you go to bed at 8:30 AM. Forcing myself to write these things down, though, helps me not to do it too often.)
The system also keeps me accountable and focused. Knowing that I will have to account for each block of time, I am less likely to take my Nintendo 3DS in the middle of the day for a break, especially since my time tracking showed me that such breaks are rarely quick. I also do not jump between different types of tasks very often (20 minutes here, 10 minutes there), because it is better to complete tasks in long periods of time. And when I look back over the past weeks and don’t see enough blue (family), pink (friends and walks), or purple (creative designs) blocks, I put more effort into conveying those colors. (Also, as an introvert, when I see too many pink blocks, I know I need to balance my time alone.)
When I first started doing this a few months ago, the weeks were mostly covered in orange (work) and some other colors. These days there is much more variety in the areas of my life in which I spend time. While time tracking can end up hurting your productivity if you track time just for the sake of it and not actually doing anything, I found that this simple technique helped me make better time decisions – without thinking about it. that’s too much.
Illustration by Sam Woolley.