The UX Blog
Five things I learned from using a time tracker
- By Sarah
A pretty productive week
Tracking my time has caused the single greatest improvement in my daily efficiency. Before I started time tracking, my days would be filled with little tasks, procrastination, and the inevitable guilt – because it never seemed like I was quite efficient enough.
So I started tracking my time, and eveything changed. Immediately. By the end of my first day I had made several surprising insights:
1. I almost never decide what to work on.
It sounds silly, but it’s true: I’d float from tab to tab in my browser, flip between open apps, and wait for some necessary task to catch my eye. Maybe it would be email, maybe it would be an interesting link, maybe it would be actual work, or maybe it would be “fake” work like ordering dinner or an extension cord from Amazon. Those tasks made me feel busy, but they weren’t usually the optimal choice for accomplishing my goals. And at the end of the day I’d think “Gee, there were so many other things I wanted to do today. Where does the time go?”
Now I know that deciding what to work on is a task in itself. It might only take a few minutes, but choosing deliberately is hugely valuable.
2. Some tasks take way more time than I expected (or than they deserve)
Ugh, shopping takes forever.
One of my biggest surprises was how some tasks took forever wihtout me noticing. A trip to the grocery store plus coffee and gas? Two hours. Reading the morning news and answering emails? 90 minutes. Making a few boring phone calls? Another hour gone. At 6 p.m. my day would feel full, but I may have only spent three or four hours on the tasks I considered most important.
Of course, sometimes I do need to go to the grocery store or run errands. But now that I know the time cost, I can build it into my schedule, batch trips together, and prevent it from eating into as much of my time.
3. I jump between tasks way more than I realized
After tracking only a few items - starting and stopping the timer as I moved from task to task – I realized that I preempt tasks a lot. No sooner would I start task A than I’d remember task B and switch over without thinking. When I first began time tracking, sometimes I wouldn’t even notice that I’d switched tasks. This never seemed like a problem before, but through tracking I could see how detrimental this context-switching was for my overall output. I was constantly spending my time on the overhead of context switching, and only rarely would I get to the meat of a task.
In retrospect, I can now see that this task-switching behavior was a necessary by-product of mistake #1 – that I was rarely choosing what to work on. But now that I actively consider what to do next, it’s easy to focus on one thing without feeling the need to hop back and forth when something pops into my head. Once in a while it’s still necessary to preempt a job, but those situations are now the exception rather than the rule.
4. Tracking helps me balance my day
Some of my week. The iPad bugs really were stupid.
When there’s a visual record of everything I’ve done in the day so far, it’s really easy to see if my time is disproportionately monopolized by just a few tasks. That makes it easier to feel good about stopping for a break or switching to a task that’s been unattended for a while. It also helps me find time for lower-priority background tasks that have no due date and would otherwise get repeatedly deferred.
5. Seeing my day’s work improves my leisure time
I didn’t realize this until I started time tracking, but there’s always been a part of me that feels a little guilty whenever I make the transition from working to relaxing. I never really know if I’ve done enough work to justify 45 minutes of Kingdom Rush on the iPad. But since I’ve begun tracking, I can relax with a clear conscience. Seeing my day’s accomplishments listed out in front of me is very freeing, and it makes my leisure time a lot more valuable and relaxing.
All in all, time tracking has been a great change in my life – it’s made me a lot more productive and a lot happier. There are lots of services to choose from, and the best one for you will probably depend on the specifics of your life. I’m using Toggl, but I’ve heard good things about Jiffy as well. Happy tracking!