How to Track Where You Spend Time With A Time Log

“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”
– Annie Dillard

Blue Clock Time Pass Time Waste Schedule

Do you wish you had more time? If you had an extra hour or two a day, can you think of how you’d like to spend it? In a recent article about How To Instantly Make Time For Yourself I discussed some research which found that for those surveyed:

70% rated themselves as busy or very busy
50% were more busy than they were the year before
90% wished they had more time to spend with friends and family

You can’t be busy without spending your time somewhere – the question is, do you know where your time is spent?

I’ve been digging around for more information on how Americans spend their time, and came across a survey done by the U.S. Department Of Labor. In the report, one statistic shocked me. In regards to how Americans voluntarily spend their average 5+ hours of leisure time per day:

“Watching TV was the leisure activity that occupied the most time, accounting for about half of leisure time, on average, for both men and women.”
– American Time Use Survey Summary, 2008

Do you see the same disconnect I do? 90% of people in the first survey wished they had more time for family and friends, and yet Americans, on average, spend half their leisure time every day watching TV!

The way I see it, there must be some people out there who wish they had more time to spend with friends and family – and yet are spending too much time in front of the television. This isn’t an attack on just TV – this is an attack on anything that causes us to waste time, instead of spending our lives on what we’d rather be doing. Instead of television, for example, I could point to how many of us waste time online.

The important thing to note is if you want more time to be spent on the things you love, how can you get there if you don’t know where your time is going right now?

Why Should I Track My Time With a Time Log?

Now you may be protesting that those survey results mean nothing – after all, nobody is really “average,” and perhaps you don’t spend that much time watching T.V. I totally understand, but if you’re anything like me, it will still be an eye opening experience. Until I tracked where my time went, I had a pretty good idea of how I spent my time – but I still benefited from a time log. Some benefits I’ve found of tracking my time include:

Identify Time Sinks. Through my own budgeting and tracking, I discovered I was spending large amounts of time in food metawork - and that analysis that led me to experiment with outsourcing my cooking.
Identifying Highly Productive Times. Logging how I spend my time has shown me that I’m most productive in the early morning a little while after waking up, and during late evening hours – and generally a little sluggish in the early evening. Your results may vary, but knowing this helps me be more productive, and schedule my days around my my peak times.
Identify Weaknesses. If you’re like me, you have a number of goals you’re trying to accomplish. Logging your time, and seeing where you actually spend your time helps you see weaknesses – goals that you’re ignoring, including social ones. I discovered when logging my time that when I skipped or postponed my workouts, it caused me to spend less time with friends. It seems obvious to me now, but at the time it was really surprising. The days I worked out in the evenings, I tended to see friends less – so I redoubled my efforts to workout early in the day.
Valuing My Time More. Just like when I count calories during my cutting phases to drop fat, or tracking where I spend my money, just being aware that I need to write down and account for where my time goes makes me value it more.

You don’t have to track your time indefinitely. I like to, but many people can obtain considerable benefits just by tracking time for a few days.

Ready to log your own time? Here’s step by step how I did my own time log.

How To Log Your Time

I broke my logging tasks up into two groups: time spent at my computer, and time spent anywhere else.

Logging Time Spent At Your Computer

One of my biggest unknowns, and perhaps yours as well, is knowing where my time goes when I’m online. Here’s a small mix of the things I do at my computer:

Check Email. The biggest one – sometimes this is productive, sometimes it isn’t.
Develop Software. Very productive, I want to do more of this.
Check Facebook and Twitter. I don’t mind this in moderation, but if I’m on there too often, I’m probably just wasting time and procrastinating.

It’s so easy to sit down at my computer intending to get some work done, but then get sucked into wasting time on random websites. The easiest way I’ve found to track the time I spend at my desk is by using a piece of time tracking software called RescueTime. It sits in my computer tray and unobtrusively logs everything – including which websites I visit, and even synchronizes the data across multiple computers. I can log into their website and few reports which show me my productivity and all the data they’ve collected, in easy to read charts.

That handles anywhere from 4-10 hours a day.

Logging Time Spent Away From Your Computer

Time Log Spreadsheet

Tracking where your time goes away from your computer is a little more difficult – unfortunately, there is no RescueTime style equivalent that unobtrusively tracks everything I do in real life. Here are some ways you can track your time manually:

Notebook. In college, I carried a notebook around, and every day I wrote down about once an hour or so what I had done for the past hour – whether it was lunch with friends, studying, etc. At the end of the day, I’d tally up my time spent in various activity buckets (such as homework, social, fitness) and once a week or so I reviewed where I was spending a lot of time – and where I was slacking.
Specifically Formatted Time Log Sheet. I created my own using my notebook, but you can print your own version using these pre-formatted sheets. Click through to preview it in your browser in Scribd and download either a PDF Version or Excel Version.
Spreadsheet. If you prefer doing things electronically, you can set up a spreadsheet with a row for every day, and columns for different activities – and put the amount of time you spend on a task in each column. For me, I never found a good solution with spreadsheets, though I have tried a few different ways. What I ended up doing was a bit of a hybrid – I’d freehand write in all the things I did for the day (in a notebook or text file), and then each day I would transfer the totals into the appropriate columns for about a dozen broad areas of my life. This way I could see the totals and look for patterns, but I’d have to look at my notebook to see the details.
Calendar. This is how I do it now. I use my Google Calendar and religiously update what I do, whether it’s hiking, writing, going to work, etc. If things change, I update my calendar – even for previous days. I have about a dozen color codes, including codes for errands, life maintenance (sleep, shower, etc) and my career. At the end of the week I can visually see the color codes. This calendar serves double duty – not only does it help me plan, but it helps me review.
Time Logging Software. I Googled and found a variety of software for tracking where your time goes. I don’t use a specific software program for this task (other than RescueTime mentioned above), but I’d be interested in seeing in your comments if you’ve used any and your results. There are a number of different pieces of web based as well as iPhone based software packages I considered- but for me, the Google Calendar route works great, so I haven’t been inclined to experiment. If it ain’t broke, don’t waste time twiddling your thumbs and looking for shiny new toys =)

Once you know where you’re spending your time – we can move to the next phase, a follow up article I’m writing, more efficiently managing and planning where to spend your time.

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