Want to become a better time manager? Download Daily Time Tracker
In order to make time work for you, establish the way time plays out in your daily life and routine. Tracking your time daily provides insight into patterns and routines that you can restructure to get more out of your day.
Predict – Let’s have some fun first
Print out a couple. Before you chart your first day let’s see how well you know yourself. Predict your time and how it’s spent. Feel free to use the hour box in segments to go into greater detail and track the minutes of the hour and what you are up to.
Write then Highlight
Use a pen or pencil throughout the day and write what you are doing or what you’ve done. Then at the end of the day use a highlighter to group your time in categories. Highlighting gives you an idea how your day is broken up into segments. Sleep, work/school, routines, free time, and hobbies.
Get Detailed
You can go into as much detail as you would like. Instead of writing morning routine (30 mins) dive deeper. Wake up, grab phone check out social media (5 mins), bathroom (2 mins), breakfast (10 mins), brush teeth (1 min), get dressed (4 mins), answer texts/social media (5 mins), leave the house (3 mins). To maximize your time it will help to examine your morning routine closer.
Notice Daily Patterns
There are portions of your day that are routine that will show up consistently on your spreadsheet. You will find out if you have a more structured schedule or overall routine by your sleep time, morning and night routines as well as eating schedule.
Use an App
You can also use any time tracking app to track your day if that’s easier. You can then write it out on the spreadsheet and highlight your day.
ATracker Time Tracker by WonderApps AB
The Results
What are your patterns showing you? How much time do you spend on a morning routine? Too long, then dive deeper and track just that portion of your day for a week. Then manage that time of your day better by restructuring that time.
The Daily Time Tracker is a great tool to reveal just where your time goes during the day. The purpose behind using a highlighter is to group the segments of your day. This is how I get into another method of becoming a better time manager. Block Structure (more details on Block Structure coming soon).
Download Daily Time Tracker