It’s also, ironically enough, a time-consuming task but this investment up front will reap dividends for the years and decades to come. Rather than a shiny new app (or a shiny new smartphone), it requires the meticulous tracking of your minutes and hours throughout the day over the course of a couple weeks, or even months. Tracking your time is not a very sexy method of increasing your productivity. Want to Get More Done? The Benefits of Tracking Your Time So if you want to start seeing your productivity abs, start tracking your time. The same exact benefits and reasonings apply to keeping a record of how one spends their hours and minutes. You’ve got to internally fess up to it.Īwareness and a healthy sense of shame and accountability add up to the fact that food diary keepers lose weight much more effectively than those who do not. Once you write that Whopper down though, it becomes real. When you scarf down a Whopper on the commute home, and discard the evidence before walking in the door, the act effectively disappears from your consciousness. There’s also an intrinsic accountability that comes with food journaling. Mindless snacking or regularly ordering dessert doesn’t seem to add up to much…until you document every mouthful of food that crosses your lips. In fact, the original study from 2008 showed that those who kept a record - either paper or digital or even photographic - of what they ate in the course of an entire day lost twice as much weight as those who didn’t.įirst of all, the simple awareness of what one is eating can come as a shock to those who are overweight. Multiple studies over the years have confirmed that keeping a food journal over the course of several weeks or even months is one of the most surefire ways to lose weight. And the solution? Time tracking, i.e., keeping a food diary. A lack of productivity is like carrying extra pounds around the waist. The propensity to get distracted is like a craving for junk food. To get a better grasp on time, I thus recommend thinking about it like something more concrete: food. You can’t see it it’s abstract even scientists are still trying to figure out its nature! One of the reasons time management is so difficult is that time itself is so nebulous. Want to Get a Handle on Time? Treat It Like Food Below I walk you through the benefits and specific tools to use to conduct this experiment and begin getting more out of life. To take control of your hours rather than being controlled by them and feeling lost at the end of the day, track your time. But if you feel like your nights and weekends continually slip by in a haze of Netflix and web surfing, and aren’t as edifying, entertaining, and/or enriching as you’d like, you can apply the same principles of time management to getting more from your leisure time. If you’re in a very structured environment where your day is largely dictated by appointments - say as a doctor or lawyer - this activity may not be very helpful for your work hours. A light bulb has gone off about how I spend my time, and what to do to make better use of it. I took on this experiment of time tracking, and after a month of doing so, I honestly believe my productivity level to be permanently increased. From there, the remedy seems pretty obvious. You say you need to get more done or that you don’t have enough time for everything, but when you actually track your time, you realize you’re spending 60 minutes a day on Facebook. To know how to be more productive, you first need to know exactly how you’re spending your minutes and hours of the day. So if you’re feeling overwhelmed - like you don’t have enough time or like you should be getting more done - where’s the best place to start? If I were to spend the time reading all those new articles and books, I’d have no time to get done what’s actually valuable and important. Every day, dozens and perhaps hundreds of articles are published online about how to get more done, both in work and in life generally. The number of productivity strategies out there are innumerable.
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