Tracking My Time Pissed Me Off – And It Was Worth It

As a productivity lover, I’ve been on a quest to try out every tactic under the sun to see what brings in optimum results.

Making my bed in the morning.
Chugging water first thing.
Planning the day before.
Batching tasks together.

The only one I avoided through the years was time tracking. Every time I tried, I’d make it through the first few hours on Monday and then everything would get too crazy and I’d forget about it until the next Monday.

I’ve heard the benefits of time tracking, but it wasn’t until I just read Off the Clock by Laura Vanderkam, that I once again remembered this experiment. In the book, she basically goes into all the deep information she now knows about herself due to time tracking.

The benefit is clear – but it was hard to decide how to start and make it not so time-consuming.

I decided to use Timecamp.com and use the manual timer to start tracking my time by project. (Also, I’m not affiliated with them in any way, I’m just telling you the tools I use.) I haven’t even used it too long but it is by far the most eye-opening productivity thing I’ve ever done.

Here are the major things I’ve learned:

Unenjoyable tasks don’t take so long

Tasks I don’t enjoy doing don’t take as long as I thought they did. In my mind, doing the dishes every week took at least two hours. It takes about 45 minutes for the whole week. I was beyond dramatic with my thoughts on how long that took.

Also, when it came to some process work that I don’t enjoy doing, I thought it took so much longer than it truly did.

When I really focus, I get so much more done

Tracking my time has made me so much more productive. When I track my time, I want to only work on the thing I’m tracking so I know how much time it takes. This uninterrupted focus has done wonders for my productivity.

I don’t work as hard as I thought

I am online for over 10+ hours a day. I thought I was spending alllllll of that time hustling and working hard. The truth is that I only spend about half of that time incredibly focused or doing deep work and half of that time floundering around or doing administrative tasks.

This is truly eye-opening and is going to make me rethink my entire workflow and productivity system I have right now.

I’m going to keep tracking my time through the rest of November and see what results I come up with from here.