Do you really know how you use your time?

Some things I learned from tracking my work time.

When I was working as a school teacher I was very clear about how I used my work time. From 8.45am until 3.30pm I was in the classroom, and there was an expectation that we teach a certain number of lessons in each subject each week. Then I had a predictable level of marking every day. The remaining time was limited, so I had to be incredibly disciplined about how I did my planning.

As I moved through my career and into different types of jobs, how I used my time became much less clear to me. I had lots of different types of work to do, usually for multiple different projects at the same time, plus a bunch of ‘compulsory’ things like team meetings and the like. I moved into a space that while I was usually relatively effective at getting things done, but I didn’t have a really clear view of how I was spending my time.

Then I started using my electronic calendar as a to-do list of sorts. I find I have a tendency to make very long ‘everything bucket’ to do lists. I note down everything I need to do and the list inflates to huge proportions and moves way beyond being a useful organising tool.

So I moved to trying to put things I needed to do in my calendar as events, estimating the chunk of time I would need to complete them. Keeping this up to date, and changing the events based on how long it actually took me to do things, I started to get a better handle on how long tasks really take to complete. This approach also encouraged¹ me to work on just one thing at once and avoid distractions.

Some time later I had a meeting with my team where a conversation developed about the number of meetings they seemed to have in their diaries and the balance between this and getting focused work done. Inspired by a conversation I’d had with a friend in consultancy who lives by ‘billable hours’ of work for clients, I suggested we try logging how we spent all our time for a week.

This sounds onerous, but with what I was doing already (and some of my team had started doing too) it wasn’t much more effort - just the time to colour code the events in the diary by category and then tally each of these up at the end of the week. Some of us did this, others totted things up with a spreadsheet. I said that we should have no expectation of sharing the detail of all this with each other, as that was a bit too much like surveillance to me. But we did commit to sharing what we learned from doing it for a week.

The results were really interesting. Everyone seemed to come to our next team meeting with a different understanding of how they used their time. Being researchers, most of us had worked out the percentage of time we spent in certain types of meetings, considered which things were non negotiable and which we had more control of, and all with some resolutions to spend less time on some things and more on others. As a team leader often responsible for the time-sucking meetings I took a long hard look at the meetings I was putting in as regular events that we defaulted to. I also looked at their duration, and tried to shorted them as much as I could so that they were kept to the bare essentials.

Now I’m not going to suggest that we should all track every minute of our days all the time. And I do think that requiring this info to be shared in detail in a work setting could be problematic and potentially constitute undue surveillance. However, as a personal exercise it is pretty interesting to see how you really use your time, because I think many of us don’t have complete clarity of how this most valuable resource gets used.

If you’ve ever thought ‘where did this week go?’, asked why you seem to spend so much time in meetings, or found tasks taking way longer (or shorter) to achieve than you estimated, then perhaps it might be useful for you to do a ‘deep dive’ on your use of time and get the real picture of how it’s being spent.

You might not have control of all of it, but if you are able to open up a conversation, for example, about spending upwards of 30% of your time in information giving meetings-that-could-be-an-email, you might find they are as concerned about the impact on productivity this is having as you are…

The clearer the understanding we all have of how we are spending our time, the more intentional we can be about this.

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Thanks for continuing to follow my newsletter. It’s been very affirming to read your positive comments about this rebooted newsletter, to see that so many of you continue to read it, and so few of you have unsubscribed despite the long hiatus.

You might be interested to know I’ve got back into writing my weeknotes each week over at oliverquinlan.com/thoughts. I’m writing these more for myself than an audience, but if you’re interested in what I’m doing work and other projects wise they are there to read.

1. ‘Encouraged’ being the word… this is still a massive challenge for all of us I think!