I used time blocking to track my time for 1 year, so you don’t have to
I tracked my time every day for a year. What I learned wasn't surprising; there were some valuable insights along the way.
I tracked my time every day for a year. What I learned wasn't surprising, but the habits I built will last forever, and there were some valuable insights along the way that are worth sharing.
TL;DR
Simply tracking your time isn't going to make you more effective.
Time blocking is a great strategy that may work for you.
Use a separate calendar for your time blocking (anything that's not an event with other people) if you have a shared calendar (otherwise, no one will book time with you because you're 'too busy' and they don't want to interrupt you).
Simple weekly to-do lists outperform task trackers. The weekly view forces you to roll over your list every week and re-evaluate your priorities often.
1 Year of tracking
I tracked every minute of my work day for one year, but was it worth it? This obsession with measuring my time started spreading into my personal life. If you're considering taking on such a task, I recommend against it. Instead, apply the lessons I learned from that year to your routine without torturing yourself with such obsessiveness.
I've tracked my time before. I did development and design work for marketing agencies for a few years, where I had to track all of my time so we could bill our clients appropriately. But that was then; this time, I had a different purpose. And instead of using a time tracker like Toggle, I relied on my calendar to track my time.
How I tracked my time
I used iknowmytime.com to get a report on my time based on colour-coded events in Google Calendar. If you're a paid Google user, that's no longer needed because Google natively supports this (on some plans). Google will show you the time spent on events per colour every week. You can even pre-name the colours as the categories you're tracking.
At the end of every week, I'd copy my totals from my calendar over to a spreadsheet and allocate my time to various 'buckets' of different types of work. Generally, I bucket my time into the following categories:
General Work and Admin
Partnership Meetings/Work
Hiring & Onboarding
1:1s and Coaching
Internal Meetings
Customer Calls
Group Work
Rituals (scrum meetings, etc)
QA/Releases
Planning/Strategy
My spreadsheet looked something like this (see Figure 1. a.), where I would normalize the hours spent as a percentage of hours worked (also considering my vacation/holidays) for each area of focus.
(Figure 1. a.)
This would then make its way into a similar chart (see Figure 2. a.), which helped me visualize my progress. (Looks like General/Admin work is pretty unavoidable.)
(Figure 2. a.)
Why track my time?
Why subject myself to nitpicking and scrutinizing the time I spend at work? Well, aside from the apparent curiosity and wanting to know how I was spending my time, there were a few other drivers:
I could identify any time-wasting habits and find ways to be more efficient.
I was already aggressively blocking time for my work anyway, so tracking that time was easy.
As our company grew, I wanted to track my progress toward spending time on the things a Head of Product in a more mature company should focus on. I evaluated my success based on three criteria:
Was I delegating enough?
Was I staying on course to achieve the objectives of my role?
I needed more time to focus on strategy. What work was becoming significant enough, it required an additional hire/role?
Why use time blocking?
Tracking your time for a few weeks with a time tracker can be a helpful exercise in understanding your work habits, but if you want control of that time, you need to do more than just track it. With time blocking, you can schedule blocks in your calendar for specific tasks and prioritize them throughout your week. This helps you stay focused and organized, ultimately leading to increased productivity. Essentially, your calendar becomes your to-do list.
As I did in my example, you can time block with colour-coded events in your calendar to denote the type of work you'll focus on. For example, you could use blue for important client meetings, green for creative tasks, and red for urgent tasks.
Suggestion: Use a separate calendar for your time blocking (anything that's not an event with other people) if you have a shared calendar (otherwise, no one will book time with you because you're 'too busy' and they don't want to interrupt you unless this is what you want).
Instead of logging your time after the fact, you're being deliberate by planning your week and deciding how you spend your time. Limiting your time spent on specific activities is also helpful so you're motivated to stay focussed and complete your work quickly. Does it usually take an hour to write your marketing brief? Give yourself 30 minutes and see if you can do it in less time.
After weeks of blocking and tracking my time, I saw patterns emerge. I spent a lot of time on tasks that should have been automated or delegated to other team members. I also noticed that I tended to get more writing done in the morning in short bursts while my afternoons were better spent connecting with people.
What about to-do lists?
If your calendar is your to-do list, do you still need a to-do list? Probably.
When time blocking, I'm usually vague about what I'm doing. I'll pick the work category, like writing documents, and schedule that for an hour in the morning. During that time block, I'll look at my weekly list (which has tasks prioritized and flagged as document writing for the day) and work through as many of those as I can during that time.
A straightforward to-do list technique I found helpful with time blocking is the "rolling to-do list." It uses a weekly checklist and allows unfinished tasks to roll over to the following week. This method involves creating a list of weekly tasks and checking off items as you complete them. Any incomplete tasks at the end of the week are rolled over to the following week's list, delegated, or ignored if they are no longer relevant.
This technique is effective because it lets you prioritize your weekly tasks and focus on the most critical items. It also gives you a sense of accomplishment as you check off completed tasks, and it helps prevent the feeling of being overwhelmed by a never-ending list of tasks.
To use the rolling to-do list method, you can create a physical list or use a digital notes app. I recommend not using task management tools like Trello or Asana because keeping tasks on there forever is too tempting. Simply add your tasks to your notepad for the week (I like to assign them to days of the week) and check them off as you complete them. Any tasks that are incomplete by the end of the week can be rolled over to the following week's list (if they're still relevant)
I've been tracking my to-dos like this for at least five years, and it's been a game-changer. Assigning my action items to specific days helps me group similar tasks and assign them to time buckets on my calendar. Re-evaluating my to-dos weekly helps me keep only the most essential tasks on my radar. Anything that falls off gets delegated, automated, or was never really that important.
What I learned
Armed with this information, I was able to make some changes to my work routine and see how my time allocation changed over the year. I automated as many time-consuming tasks as possible and delegated others to free up time to focus on the areas of work that needed more attention. I also tackled my most essential tasks in the early morning when I was most productive.
Given a choice, I don't think I would do this again. Reporting on my time was a helpful introspective tool that opened my eyes to how much control one can have over one's time if they're deliberate. Now that I've unlocked this realization, I'm actively scrutinizing my time and what I'm working on daily without reporting on it.
There are many great ways to manage your time, so what works for you?