How To Audit Your Time
Where does the time go? In whatever working circumstance you are in, time management can become an issue. The key to even coming close to managing your time the way you really want is defining exactly where your time ends up.
Enter time auditing. This is the simple activity of tracking where you spend your time. Whether you only track your working hours, or your entire day, this can prove to spearhead the changes you want to make in your time management.
At the end of a week, go through and tally up how much time you spent on specific categories of activities. When you review your logs, the categories will “suggest” themselves, but try to lump activities into as few buckets as possible.
I would think this is a good first step to organizing and scheduling your work. Put notes in your audit book [or software] for when you work particularly hard and fast on a project and when you don’t.
Go audit yourself - [GenuineCuriosity]
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Comments
Bas says on August 7th, 2007 at 1:19 pm
I have started doing this some 3 weeks ago and it has really served me well and made me generally more conscious of time wasting. I use the PCEO emergent task planner template.
Eugene says on August 8th, 2007 at 7:40 am
I started tracking my time many years ago. Started out just as major events on a paper calendar and now I just enter a simple calendar entry when I switch tasks rounded to 15 minute intervals. A simple copy/past of the “drive to work” and “drive home” entries makes it easy to track repeat tasks from day to day. Kind of interesting to make reports based on the number of hours you spend doing x or Y over the period of a year.
Mahin says on August 12th, 2007 at 1:31 pm
I developed a free igoogle gadget (”Activity Tracker”) especially for this purpose.
You can view a graph of how you spend your time. You can also export the data as excel or print out the report. visit http://screeperzone.com/punchclock
thought you might be interested.
Dwayne Melancon says on August 13th, 2007 at 6:24 pm
Thanks very much for the pickup here - and these tips and gadgets are great, folks.