Tracking time

I like tracking and measuring. May be its a result of professional conditioning or just a little quirk. But the fact is that in my personal space, I have numerous excel sheets floating around. Many are useless for most practical part, but I still get a kick out of knowing where I stand.

I have one for the books – giving me a glance of which ones I have, which ones do I wish to read, how many have I read out of current stash of unread ones and how am I doing on my annual target of reading books. I have one to track habits that I want to develop. There’s one to track To Dos and helps keep me sane. The list of lists is endless 🙂

Like all busy women (and men), I sometimes get overwhelmed with things that need to be managed. And then its a downward spiral – of frustration (I dont have time for drawing…), guilt (I am not giving enough attention to younger one’s studies…), stress (I am not prioritizing important things) and so forth.

The sane part of my mind would remind me to do something about it than just cribbing. Some time back, I decided to do just that. Like we do in professional world, I thought I’d start with collecting data points before attemping to solve the issue. In other words to do something about managing time well, I decided to first understand where it was being spent.

I started to track my time. I created a simple spreadsheet to log my time (picture above is the one). I would note down when I started to do something and when I ended it, along with what ‘category’ it belonged to (work, kids, family, daily chores etc). Since my work is all on the laptop and I usually work long hours, this spreadsheet was almost always open on the side, which made it easier. I did it for 2 months to minimize bias in the data. And when I looked through it to decipher patterns, I was suprised, to say the least. I learnt a few things that I had may be turned a blind eye to. It nudged me to re-think and re-prioritize.

Here are some of the things that I learnt:

Narratives we believe in, may not always be right

My time log showed that I work on an average 10.8 hours a day. This is solid productive work, without counting any breaks. Considering I am awake on an average 17 hours a day, this is roughly 64% of my waking time. It brought up an interesting insight. Since I work mostly non-stop (with only a 10 min lunch break during the day) till evening and then an hour or two at night, taking calls, it used to feel like I am always working. I had this narrative going in my head that I work long hours. That I don’t get enough time to read or do things I like to do. Now, long or short may be subjective but data shows that there still is 36% of the time available to me to do other things. And this was eye opening to me. 

I can make time for things that  matter

There are pockets of time here and there, which we don’t usually consider when we think about our day. For me, it turned out to be the morning time. This time never registered in my mind, since to me, my day started when I sat down to work. But the data showed that I have 2-3 hours right there, lying around to be put to good use. I used to spend this time, usually just lazing in bed, browsing social media, puttering around house, doing random things. I am now trying to be more conscious and intentional of this time window. I try to meditate (learning, and can’t seem to do it 😦 ), read, either draw or write and talk to my mom during this time. I still browse social media but try to limit it.

I need to be intentional about important things like family

Inherently, I am not much of a social person. While I knew I was not doing enough to keep up socially, the time log was a hard kick in the you-know-what. Family and friends are important and while I always had good intentions in mind, calling them up somehow fell through cracks. Time-log was an eye opener and I could literally count the (few) times I spoke to people who are important.

I need to pause and reflect

Looking at the’ time logs, I realized that most of my days are running on auto-pilot mode. There are things to be done – professionally, for kids, for myself and for the household. It’s always checking off the To-Do lists, doing one task after the next. I have not been putting any thought or energy in pausing and reflecting. I need to make time and space for reflection – processing, calibrating and adjusting. 

Now that I know how and where I spend my time, I can make adjustments. I can (hopefully) streamline things by doing less of certain things and finding pockets of time to do more of certain things. First step taken, onwards to next one!