The Benefits of Time Tracking

An exciting and transformational activity to flourish your career is that of dedicating two weeks to track your time at work and uncover the hidden treasures and insights you might be missing.  

There are heaps of benefits to doing this that your future self will thank you for.  Most importantly you will discover what activities bring you joy, those that drain you, and those that should bring you joy but need some tweaking in order to release their magic. This is knowledge that you can wield wisely to recraft what you do and how you do it.

A couple of weeks time tracking is like holding a magnifying glass that gives you super sleuth insights in to your professional self.  You can use the data you gather to boost your productivity, ensure you keep things in balance with work and home, spot skill gaps, and spot strengths and superpowers.  It is super useful data for setting work goals and to bring yourself a little accountability. You will also learn things that will be valuable in making cases for promotion or during selections.

Here's how to do it.

Create a pen and paper, or an electronic document, in which you divide your work day into half hour blocks.

Create columns to record the work activities you were doing in each half hour block, as well as columns for who is around you, where you are, and any technology/tools you are using.

Then dedicate a number of columns to use in reflecting on certain aspect of the activity. You get to decide what things it will be beneficial for you to reflect on.  For example it is often useful to reflect on:

• Your enjoyment of the activity
• How engaged you are while doing the activity
• How challenging the activity is
• The level of impact the activity has

Other things to have reflection columns for might be the physical exertion, the success of it, the level of autonomy you have, how much you are learning...  Trust that you will know the best things to reflect upon, but don't have too many as it will make the exercise onerous.

In your reflection columns use a scale that will give you meaningful data e.g. a scale such as 1-5, or red/amber/green, or words such as high through to low.

When you have finished a couple of weeks of time tracking step back and be a fascinated anthropologist, uncovering the nuggets of gold that the data can reveal.  Some questions you might want to ask are:

• Which activities energise you and which ones drain you?
• Who is it good to be around?
• Where are you when you feel most engaged?
• Are there activities that are similar but don't give you the same level of joy?  Why do you think this is so?
• Were you interrupted while doing some activities?

It might initially seem a daunting task, but think about it as an adventure and go exploring.

As always, wishing you a flourishing career.

Katherine