Personal Time Studies for Improved Focus

One of the most important and overlooked components of productivity is whether or not you are working on the right things.

All of us are busy. We all have too many things to accomplish on a daily, weekly, monthly and yearly basis. It can be easy to mistake staying busy for productivity. We have so much to do that we sometimes focus on the amount we are doing instead of what we are actually accomplishing.  This can lead to accomplishing a higher number of lower-priority items while neglecting the important priorities.

This is where a personal time study is really helpful. Use it as a check-in to confirm that you are not only staying busy (which we know you are) but that you are busy doing the most critical tasks. Many people think they are working on the right things but are surprised how out of alignment they truly are when they run this exercise. We give ourselves to much credit when we guess at how we are filling our time.

I recommend doing this at least once a year to combat non-priority work from creeping-in but you might consider doing it twice a year if you really struggle with prioritizing your critical work.

Know Your Priorities

Before you start tracking anything, it's important to know your priorities. I recommend doing this as the first step so that you don't find yourself justifying how you've spent your time after the exercise is complete. Write those priorities down before the exercise.

Create a Tracking Log

Create a tracking-log that breaks down your entire day into 15 minute increments.  I've created a google sheets here, but you can create your own or even keep it in a notebook if you prefer.

15 minutes seems like a short frequency but with the level of distractions and task-switching we see in the workplace, this duration allows us to capture what we're spending our time on without being able to hide unimportant busy work with other tasks.

Track It

From here, you track what you're doing for at least two weeks and ideally 4 weeks. 4 weeks is ideal because there are some things that only occur once a month and you risk missing those if you only run this for two weeks.

This exercise is only beneficial to the extent of your honesty with it. If you spent a majority of a 15m window scrolling social media, put that down.

Assess

Now that you've tracked your every-waking-hour at 15 minute intervals for two (hopefully four) weeks, it is time to review the results. Group like items for the duration of the entire time study and compare them to the top priorities that you documented prior to starting the exercise. How much of your time are you spending on your priorities and long-term goals? How much time was spent on things that are less important or that you don't truly need to do at all?

Take Action

Now that you know how much of your time you are spending on critical items, you can probably guess the next step.  It's time to eliminate as much of the non-critical work that you can. This can mean delegating, automating or even eliminating wherever possible.

Thank you for reading. My hope is always that you've found something helpful and easy to implement.