If you want to achieve big goals, or you just like to do a lot of different things in your life, it's imperative to be very conscious about how you spend your time.
Therefore, once or twice a year I take the time to examine very closely how I spend my days.
Planning
First I make a plan on how to distribute the 168 hours of a week. I create categories for what is important in my day-to-day life and allocate the desired amount of time spent each week.
I do this in a simple Excel sheet and also create a pie chart so I can quickly get an overview on how the time of my week should be allocated.
Then I go to my Google Calendar and create a new calendar where I’d allocate those time blocks to actual times & days.
This doesn’t have to be 100% accurate but it’s more a rough planning on when to focus on what activity.
Tracking
Now I want to set up a time-tracking tool, so I can actually track my week and see what’s the reality, compared to the planning. I use toggl.com because it’s easy to set up & use and comes with a pretty good app for the phone.
In the toggl app I create projects according to my categories. I treat each part of my day-to-day life as a project, and if something new comes up, like a new side project, for example, I will add it to my planning later on.
Then I track every minute of my day for the duration of a week or two to understand better how I actually use my time.
The toggle app on the phone allows to start tracking time with a simple button press. If you press the button again it will stop the time and you can assign one of your categories to it. This is now saved in your weekly timetracking.
Toggl Mobile App
Use the mobile app to track your time when you’re on the move. It’s super simple and after some time it will become a habit quickly.
For example, before I’d go to sleep I’d press the button to start tracking time for sleep. After waking up I’d stop the time track and assign the category “Sleep”. Then I immediately start tracking again and begin my morning routine.
I continue like this throughout the day and assign every timetrack a certain category. Eating, sleeping, working, exercising, freetime and so on.
Evaluating & Adjusting
After doing that for a week or two, I can now go and analyse the time I tracked in the toggle app. I’m excited to see how the reality looks like in comparison to my planning!
Above is a calendar of the whole week with all timetracks like they actually happened. It’s interesting to compare this with the planning in the Google calendar from above.
Below is the report for the week by projects or categories.
This will be compared to the planning in the Excel sheet above.
I have put them above each other so we can easily analyse where the inconsistencies are between planning and reality:
What we can see is that the numbers for the categories sleep, side projects and personal management are almost accurate. Here I have planned very well apparently.
The hours for exercising and education are slightly off, which is fine. Of course, those will vary from week to week.
But the really important thing is, that we can clearly see that I have spent almost double the amount of hours for freetime & socializing than planned!
Clearly, a minimal planning of 14,5 hours for freetime was a vast underestimation. From this discrepancy, I can learn for the future. I need to plan more time for leisure and to be with other people. But also maybe cut back on those hours a little bit.
And with both of my business responsibilities, I was over 5 hours short this week. This should not happen. Here I need to cut back a little bit of freetime. 45 hours of work a week should be possible and is actually the minimum amount necessary if I want to be successful with two businesses at the same time.
Conclusion
First, it’s really important here to track every minute of the week and assign it to a category, so an accurate comparison is actually possible.
If you want to achieve more than average in your life, you need to be conscious about your time and its management. You can’t just let life happen and then wonder, why you are not where you want to be.
Everybody has 168 hours a week available. The time is yours. Make smart decisions about how you want to use it.
Of course, my life does not always look exactly like this. There needs to be room for adventure, spontaneity, and creativity. Routines change. Priorities sometimes too.
But it’s always an enlightening exercise to do that from time to time to become conscious about how we actually spend our time.