Here’s What Happened When I Tracked My Time for Two Weeks

This essay originally appeared in the Monday morning newsletter on 9/28/20.

In 2016, Laura Vanderkam, author of several time management and productivity books, published an op-ed in the New York Times titled, The Busy Person’s Lies. The article recounted Laura’s experience with logging time in half-hour blocks for a full year (a year, by the way, that included things such as having a fourth baby, publishing a book and traveling for work!).

As she writes in the article, while she “didn’t discover a way to add an extra hour to every day,” she did learn that the stories she told herself about where her time went weren’t always true. In fact, “the hour-by-hour rhythm” of her life was not quite as hectic as she thought.

I’m so excited to share today’s newsletter because as explained below, after finding Laura’s content recently, I too embarked on a time-tracking challenge: Every day for the past two weeks, I have tracked my time in half-hour increments. And while my experiment was smaller in scale, I wholeheartedly agree with Laura’s findings. The data I collected from these 336 hours allowed me to challenge my perception around my time, which is something I desperately needed help with right now.  

Why would I want to track my time?

Before we get any further, let me backup and give some context as to why I became interested in the idea of time tracking.

As I wrote about in July, I returned to Chicago after staying with family in Florida from March to the end of June. This was a big change and I knew there would be adjustments and growing pains. But as someone who derives energy from time spent alone, I was also really excited about getting back to my own space.

For better or for worse, I’m more of a live-to-work person than a work-to-live person. I get really passionate about whatever I’m working on and I wrap a lot of my self-worth up in my productivity (working on this). As I prepared to go back to Chicago, I was jazzed thinking about the work I would get done thanks to my circumstances of living by myself and working remotely. In pre-pandemic times, I always loved the chance to work from home vs. in the office because I could re-allocate time spent commuting or chatting with co-workers into more dedicated, focused working time. I couldn’t wait to see what it would be like with that as my new everyday reality. 

But then, about six weeks into this new situation, the novelty had worn off and I could feel myself approaching a breaking point (Why do I need to keep learning this lesson?). And, I was really frustrated because it felt like no matter how much I worked, my to-do list only got longer. Every new ask, assignment or deadline sent me into a tizzy. I knew I needed to make some adjustments, but I was too close to everything to see a way out.

Fortunately, I had previously scheduled a week of vacation time for the first week in September. I’m incredibly thankful for the opportunity to take time off because it ended up being just what I needed. For the entire week, I only had two goals: 1. I wanted to rest and 2. I wanted to remove myself from my day-to-day work to really figure out how I could work smarter instead of harder.

It was during this week off when I heard about something called the “busy-ness delusion.” During an interview about her new book, Do Nothing: How to Break Away from Overworking, Overdoing, and Underliving, journalist and author Celeste Headlee talked about how we are not as busy as we think we are (sense a theme here?). Celeste explains that we’ve tricked our brains into thinking we’re insanely busy because we never give them a break. For example, if we have a 10-minute break in between meetings, but then we sit at our desk scrolling Instagram, our brains aren’t actually getting a break. Our brains don’t make the distinction between work and Instagram.

This resonated with me. The story I was telling myself – and others – was that “work is crazy, I’m stressed and I’m working non-stop.” But after hearing about the busy-ness delusion, I wanted to challenge this idea. Was I working nonstop? Or did my brain just think I was working nonstop because, fueled by my situation of living by myself and working remotely, I wasn’t giving myself the right kind of breaks?   

One thing led to another and I ended up also finding Laura Vanderkam and her idea of time tracking. I downloaded her book Off the Clock: Feel Less Busy While Getting More Done (only $4.99 for the Kindle version!), read it in a matter of days and embarked on my experiment.
 
What did I learn?

As you’ve likely gathered by now, I really enjoyed the two-week experiment and learned a lot. In a lot of ways, it reminded me of budgeting and tracking my expenses, which is an activity I find imperative for managing my finances. As mathematician Karl Pearson put it perfectly, “That which is measured improves. That which is measured and reported improves exponentially.”

From my time logs, I was able to look at the data and analyze the average time spent on various tasks over the course of a week. For example, I learned that:

• I worked less hours than anticipated. And yes, it hurts my ego a bit to admit this. During my two-week experiment (which included one and a half work days taken as vacation days), I worked about 35 hours per week. To realize that work only made up 20% of my whole week really put things into perspective.  
• I spent a good amount of time cooking/eating meals at home and getting ready/unready. I spent around 8 and 4 hours per week, respectively, on these activities. A little bit of time each day adds up to a decent amount of time spent per week on things that inherently require me to be focused on a task other than work. How can I seize these guaranteed, everyday opportunities to better register them as breaks?
• I spent the same amount of time on exercise and reading, but the time was less than anticipated for exercise and more than I thought for reading. I would say movement (especially when done outside) and reading are two of my favorite hobbies. So, it was funny to see that I unintentionally allocated the same amount of time to both: working out and reading both took up about 6 hours of the week. However, prior to seeing the data, I definitely perceived that I spent a lot much more time exercising than I did reading. So interesting!  

Will I continue to track my time?  

Yes and no. I have a slight advantage because I already have to bill my time for work. So for now, the plan is to continue tracking in real-time during work hours to improve accuracy and perception.

And while my primary focus was getting a handle on how I spend my time in relation to work, the experiment was also helpful in improving my perception of non-work time too. After all, the data showed that on average, only 20% of my time for the week was dedicated to work. This percentage will definitely fluctuate from week to week, but the key takeaway for me is that there is actually some open time for activities like calling a friend, laying on the couch or going for a walk. Now that I’m aware of that, I’m being more mindful about seeking out these type of restful activities and fully enjoying them when I do. 

How to get started?

If you are interested in embarking on your own time tracking activity, I would say the best place to start is either with one of Laura’s books (especially Off the Clock or 168 Hours) or her website, where she offers a free time tracking sheet. For my experiment, I found it helpful to downloaded Laura’s spreadsheet to the Google sheets application, to easily access from any device.

Then, start by tracking one day and see what you discover. And if you do pursue the two-week experiment like me, I can’t wait to hear what you think!

I think for many of us, this year has challenged our feelings about time. I know that I’ve wished time would speed up and at other times, I’ve wanted it to slow down. But I hope this content provides you with a bit of grace today. Even though we know there will always be 24 hours in a day and seven days in a week, it’s equally important to recognize that unique circumstances can contribute to how we perceive said time.

If you’ve felt out of control in regards to managing your time (and who hasn’t while our world has been turned upside down?), please know you are not alone. For me, time tracking was a really helpful tool to gain perspective and improve the experience of my day-to-day life. My hope is that it does the same for you. 

After all, time is precious. Let’s make this week’s 168 hours count.

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