How to Increase Your Value by Tracking Your Time
It is always true that time is money. Time is valuable because everyone, rich and poor, has only 24 hours. At Unleash Your Potential, there is an article on introducing a way to identify and eliminate time-waster and low-contribution tasks – by keeping an activity log:
If you don’t know where you are spending your time, you are wasting money. One of the most profitable skills that I learned in my first job after college was tracking my time in 15 minute increments. I was working as a staff accountant for a local CPA firm and had to account for all of my time. If I didn’t track my time, then I didn’t get paid. In addition to tracking my time, the majority of my time had to be billable. This exercise taught me to be aware of where I was spending my time and to focus on activities that generated profit for the firm. In subsequent industry jobs, I realized that this skill gave me a significant competitive advantage. While others were engaging in “water cooler” conversations, I was getting recognized and promoted.
The section on The Currency of Time talks about everyone has the same amount of time, but the value of it can be different by spending the time wisely. It is exactly how we should remind ourselves everyday.
How to Increase Your Value by Tracking Your Time – [Unleash Your Potential]
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Comments
Dan says on October 10th, 2006 at 10:32 am
Very thought provoking. Does anyone know of a good software program to help you track and analyze time use?
I currently use a calendar in Microsoft Outlook to do this, but while Outlook lets you categorize events, it doesn’t have any tools to analyze them (i.e. how much of my time in the last week did I spend surfing the internet?).
Jake says on October 10th, 2006 at 11:44 am
I know that this is self-promotion, but my website actually solves your problem so I think this is an acceptable post. http://www.toodledo.com is an online todo list and I recently added a Time Tracking tool to it. Each task can have a little timer attached to it, so you can keep track of all the time that you spend on every project. At the end of the week you can easily look back and see how much time you spent on the various tasks.
Peter says on February 26th, 2007 at 2:18 pm
Here’s a calculator that will tell you at what point you’re wasting your time, and it’s better to get someone else to do it.
Cheers,
Peter