About 8 years ago, I began tracking my time because I was feeling overwhelmed by the constant demands of daily life. As many people have learned this year (because of Covid-19), working at home is hard – especially when when your family members are also working and studying at home. It’s easy to get to the end of the day without having done what you needed to do, and then wonder where the time went. But if you track your time then you know exactly where it went, and you can spot patterns and make adjustments. The most important thing I’ve figured out is that my time follows my attention, and that I have (a least a little) control over where my attention goes.
For example, one of my biggest time-sinks has been reading blogs by intelligent and interesting people. This is an activity I really enjoy and value when it is rewarding, but I found that not only did I spend far too much time doing it, I kept doing it even when it wasn’t rewarding. So I tracked which blogs I read and how I felt after each reading session, then unsubscribed from the mailing lists of the blogs that didn’t make me feel consistently fantastic. Then I only visited them when I had a little extra time and wondered what they were up to, instead of when I should have been painting or working on a grant application but got distracted by the email prompt. By the time I checked in with the blogs, there were usually several new posts to choose from, and I would only read the ones I was actually interested in. This was so effective that I also unsubscribed from the mailing lists of the blogs that did make me feel consistently fantastic, and I started reading those ones on my own schedule as well. This simple switch from following a prompt to making a conscious choice not only saved me time, it also improved my experience of reading blog posts.
Almost all my time-sinks were online, and could be dealt with in a similar way to what I described above. Cooking fancier food than necessary was my only substantial analog time waster, so I worked out a way to be more efficient and adopted an eat-to-live attitude with fancy cooking as a rare treat instead of a daily indulgence.
Now I’m pretty good at not wasting my time, and I’m starting to wonder if tracking my time is a good use of my time. It can be tedious to log in and out of every single activity, and while I still need to know how much time I spend painting or doing other art related administrative tasks, I probably don’t need to track every moment of every day.
So I stopped.
Since the beginning of November, I’ve only been tracking my work activities, and it’s been really interesting. I feel a sense of relief at not having to pick up my phone every time I switch activities, and find that I check other things on my phone less often because of it.
I’ve also noticed that I feel more pressure to get in front of my easel now that my time log only shows work time. Before, if I had a day with no red bars (painting time), I could look and see what else I did – which gave me an excuse of sorts. That day I did the shopping, or I had to XYZ. But now the empty space stares back at me like an accusation, and each day when I wonder what to do next I’m reminded of how good it will feel to put a little red bar on my log, and how bad it will look if it’s empty.
I’ve decided to stick with this pared back tracking for one year, then assess how things went. If I’m unsatisfied with my artistic output, or if the time I spend painting is significantly lower than the previous year, I may go back to tracking everything. If not, I’ll go another year and see what happens. Maybe by then I’ll have something else that needs improvement, and I’ll track it until I’m in control.