Track every activity at work this week

Why are you doing it?

How much time have you spent on it?

This was a revelation to me.

Boundaries, responsibilities, accountability. It was a win, win, win.

Often we hear don’t we about setting boundaries; don’t work too much, make sure you know where your time is best spent. This all sounds brilliant doesn’t it, but in practice how do we know that what we are doing is a productive use of time and isn’t encroaching on other roles we have to play outside of work?

Like keeping up with my step count, I’m very well disciplined in tracking my work time too. I work on several projects and it’s important to me that I know that time invested in each is fair, is effective and has a good return on investment.

This challenge only really became beneficial to me when I started truly valuing my time. So often we see such disregard for our own time or that of our colleagues or customers. I assumed a value on my time – let’s say £100 per hour for example. If we aim for an 8 hour working day then I know that I have in my time wallet the equivalent of £800.

So all of a sudden more menial tasks become something that isn’t worth the time investment and may be something I can outsource for example. I can also track at the end of the month using an app (ATracker is my chosen app) the return on investment from each of my projects.

An example of how this helped me get rid of some not so good elements of my early work would be to track how much time I spent at networking events in the evenings. Let’s say this was 15 hours (including travel). By my reckoning of £100 per hour this should generate me £1500 revenue to be a worthy investment. I can tell you now, it most certainly was not bringing in this level of revenue. So my time input to revenue output was completely out of balance. Only by tracking this and seeing the results can I then make a better decision to ditch this part of my activity.

This gives me 15 hours back to be at home, be more productive, work on other products or proposals and get a better return on my time.

I love this exercise, it really keeps me in control, keeps me responsible and holds me accountable for my own actions.