Know where the time went
The unreasonable impact of writing down what you did
Like most good habits, I formed it by being forced to do it.
A few years ago, I worked in consulting and had to keep track of my time because we billed by the hour. I discovered that writing down how I spent my time made me wildly more productive.
So, I expanded time-tracking to my personal life, and instead of Client X, I’d tag the time with a category like “doomscrolling” (it was 2020), “reading,” “coding,” etc.
I didn’t really review my time once I’d written it down. Aside from generating summaries we sent to clients for billing purposes, I never looked back at where the time went.
I haven’t created any graphs correlating doomscrolling with various news events, despite that sounding like a fun thing to do right now.
Just the act of writing down when I switch activities does the trick. It’s really the only productivity system I’ve felt made a difference — so maybe it’ll help you, too. Here’s what I think is going on:
Switching between tasks is too easy nowadays. But switching creates friction — it’s costly to switch contexts. It makes you much less productive. So, if you have to do something to switch tasks — e.g., you have to start the timer on the next task — it raises the cost of switching and helps keep you on task.
Think about your tasks as clients. You wouldn’t bill a client for time spent working on another client, right? Similarly, only billing time for your current task focuses your mind and keeps you on track. I think that’s how time-tracking helped me do more things and spend my time intentionally.
The other reason time tracking works is shame.
Shame is a powerful motivator, and visibly seeing that I spent four hours scrolling Twitter/X for the latest updates on Celebrity Trial X is enough to inspire change, embarrassment, and a deep desire not to waste any more time. I don’t need to look at a report. I know what I did.
So, how does it work?
- When you start a new task, record the category of the task and the start time.
- When you are ready to switch tasks, enter the stop time for the previous task.
- Then, create a new task and continue.
That’s it.
There are many ways to do this in practice. I program, so I wrote a little app for this (I released it publicly years later if you’re curious: https://stpwtch.com—I don’t make a dime off it). There are many other software options (Google: time tracker).
In general, I’d avoid the ones designed more for employee time entry systems — time cards, etc. — because they’ll usually be overkill, but there are nice, simple ones. For example, I’ve heard good things about https://getharvest.com, but the nice thing is that the above workflow is so simple that the choice of technology isn’t important. A spreadsheet would probably work just fine.
The key is to introduce a cost to switching tasks without making that cost so prohibitive that you stop tracking time. It’s a balance.
Time-tracking is like keeping track of what we eat. We already know spending four hours scrolling social media is bad for us, like eating that quadruple cheeseburger. But writing it down helps us face the fact that that’s what we’re doing—that’s what we’re eating—and helps us learn to spend the most valuable resource wisely.
If you’re looking for a straightforward New Year’s resolution… I recommend resolving to keep track of what you spend your time on. That way, you’ll know where it all went.
Thanks for reading!
Zach
Connect at: https://linkedin.com/in/zlflynn
