More Time With Time Logging

TLDR:
Time Logging allowed me to:

• better / more consciously manage my time
• improve my productivity and effectiveness
• eliminate and delegate activities which value vs cost ratios are less attractive compared to other activities

In our daily lives, everybody complain about the lack of time, but many of us waste time, repeating activities, that we can either limit or give up on. Without realising what we devote our time to on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. We will most likely face a problem managing our time and planning the right activities in the future. Unfortunately, most of us manage our time poorly, only dividing it into three to four blocks like work time, family time, or private time This approach has one basic benefit, it is very simple to execute, however, the biggest downfall of this approach is that it’s very inaccurate, and we should optimize these activities. Time we save this way we can allocate to other activities which we find attractive and don’t have the time for at the moment.

Benefits of Time Logging

Thanks to time logging we can find out which activities tend to steal our time, and what amount of time we spend on this activity every day, week, month, year, etc. This also allows us to find out how much time we spent on activities that are important for us (We may come to interesting conclusions like “Why Am I making such slow progress in programming? That’s because I spend only 4 hours a week practicing and the rest of time I spend of rubbish things like watching videos on which languag is better etc.)

Without time logging, we access the this above information and be able to better manage and consume our time in the future. We often perceive our activities as singular one-time events, forgetting about the sum of the time spent on these activities weekly, monthly, or yearly. For example, if you spent 2 hours per day on meetings, you wouldn’t realise that you spend 8 hours per week, and 32 hours per mont on meetings, etc. If you start logging your time you discover which activities take most of your time so that you can fix your daily routine.

Since 2018 up until now I’ve been monitoring my time, below are the optimizations I’ve made:

a) business

+email and calls

In 2017 on average I spent 12 hours in a week on emails and calls. Since 2018, I’ve completely eliminated business calls and now I’m checking my emails only for 30 minutes every day, that is only 3 hours per week working with emails.

+ team meetings

Team meetings are waste the most time in every company. We decided to completely quit the meeting culture. All of our tasks we work out in Jira and Google-Docs without voice calls and keeping text messaging at absolute minimum. Sometimes, we need to make a quick voice calling limited to 15–30 minutes based on an earlier planned agenda.

+ remote work/custom working hours

I usually spend one hour per day on commuting to my office and going back home. Now I’am working remotely, and when I need to go to the office I choose the time of the day when the city is of traffic jams usually from 6AM to 2PM, etc. Saves 5 hours by a week.

b) private life

+ cooking

I actually eat raw food, but sometimes, I find myself spending more time buying food, so I decided to outsource cooking and buy food from a specialized company. Saves 3 hours a week.

+ calisthenics & ashtanga

In my case, I wanted to decrease the time I used to spend on a daily exercise like ashtanga and calisthenic. I would usually spend 2 hours a day in the gym (counting drive, shower, small talk with other members etc.). On average I would spend 10 hours every week at the gym, but I spent on exercise for only 30 minutes. So instead of hitting the gym in the morning, I started exercising at my house with the same equipment that I would use at the gym. I saves 7.5 hours, because after waking up I shower anyway.

+ communication with friend

A year ago I made a small experiment and I started using witch messenger, telegram, skype, and other similar apps to contact family and friends (excluding real-life meetings in the evenings) everyday from 4PM to 5PM for a maximum of 30 minutes. I haven’t noticed that my relations have gotten worse with my friends, but I gained hours for other activities.

+ content consuming

I remember the time when I would spend 2–3 hours daily browsing the web, posting on social media, etc. For the last 3 years I’ve been reading important news from newsletter 1.5 hours per week on Thursdays and checking in on social media etc. The more interesting articles, posts, etc I have been sending to kindle and read them later on during my reading blocks. From Friday to Wednesday, I don’t browse social media like Facebook, Twitter, Reddit or browse the web.

How do you log your time?

For logging your time you can use whatever you want, like paper notes, sheets, special apps like toggle, desk time etc. In my case, I use google sheets where I add activities every morning from the previous day based on my memory and logs from desktime.com (this is a simple application for logging your activity from a computer, mobile device). It’s irrelevant which toolsyou are going to use, the most important part is regularity and consistency in adding everyday logs.

Weekly evaluation

This part is the most important, without this part-time logging is a waste of time. Evaluation is key for success, in my case, I am doing evaluation every week on Thursdays, when I summarise every activity and look for activities that I can optimize further, that way I see which activities I should quit immediately and which ones I should delegate to another person.

That’s it, but most of the people to whom I presented this idea have a problem with weekly evaluation and deciding which activities they need to optimize. On the other hand, a person who’ve made a habit of recurring retrospection and is doing it regularly, comes back with feedback that this method helped them find more time and get rid of useless activities that only consumed too much of their time.

In weekly evaluation, it is also important to analyse every new activity and decide if this activity will be important in the future and how much time it’s consumed till now and it will consume in the future.

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