A day is 16 free hours. It often happens that the day has passed, but it is difficult to remember what you have done during this time. It is quite possible that you have been working closely all this time and being distracted only by the road, lunch and other important matters, but another picture often happens: here you are distracted, there you chat, then, like, for five minutes on the Internet, and half an hour has passed — and half a day lost.
What did you do? — well, ra-a-aznym …
It would be great to know exactly how the day went. Where each hour was invested and how it worked for your goals. There is an easy way to do this, you will need either a notepad or open a word file.
Then the task is simple, you need to mark what you are doing every 15 minutes during the day. For example:
10:00 am working
10:15 I communicate with the customer on Skype
10:30 Rest, sleep
10:45 am working, answering emails
By the end of the day, you should have a spreadsheet that records the time and what you did. You can choose the whole day, but for a start it is better to choose a period of 2-3 hours and write down your activities only at this time.
It’s better to choose an interval that’s important when you don’t know you might be wasting time. Often this happens in the evening, weekend or some period of time at work.
How effective was the day?
If you have made a time tracking, then you can calculate how effectively your day went. It is quite simple to do this, you have before your eyes a list of your tasks for the day.
After that, your task is to distribute all the entries into categories. There are three categories in total:
- A business — your work, what brings you profit and promotes your projects (you can also enter vocational training here)
- Service — current cases that are not relevant, but without which it will be difficult to work. This includes: food, household chores, parsing the desktop or folders on the computer, installing the necessary software, refueling the car, and much more.
- Emptiness — everything else that does not work for your projects and is not a service. Usually these are entertainment, empty arguments, the search for the meaning of life, reading books without a specific goal.
Next, your task is to calculate the percentage of Cause, Service and Emptiness. In my example it turns out:
- Case – 5 entries = 70%
- Service — 1 entry = 15%
- Void — 1 entry = 15%
I can immediately say that the optimal ratio looks something like this:
- Case — 65%
- Service — 30%
- Void — 15%
You can see every day what ratio you get. If you see that it would be reasonable to change the ratio in some direction, feel free to set yourself a task for the next day. It is correct to translate the Void into a Service or a Case and sometimes it is useful to reduce the amount of the Service.
How much exercise to do
For a good result, you need to keep track of the time at least two weeks. The first week can be done as an “exploratory” one, keeping track of time for several hours a day, choosing a convenient format.
The second week, you can keep track of time for the whole day or at least most of the day.
Criteria for passing the exercise
The main result that you should get after this exercise is that a “timer” should appear in your head. This timer will periodically remind you that time is running out and ask the question: “What are you spending this time on? And how does it work for your tasks?
There are 7 video lessons in the course. View >>