About twenty years ago, I started planning, tracking, and analyzing my hours. Gradually, I will introduce my complete time management system to readers. In this post, the focus will be on time tracking.
This process is a habit that dramatically enhances our productivity and quality of life. Let’s find out why.
What Is Time Tracking?
Time tracking is a written register in which we track the time spent on each work or day-to-day activity.
The basics of this control are to write down a brief description of the task, the time we started to run it, the time we finished it, and how long it takes.
Example
- Writing the scientific article Inclusive Management – 02/28
- 7:35 – 9:10 am (1 hour and 35 minutes)
- 9:20 – 10:40 am (1 hour and 20 minutes)
- 11:05 – 11:45 am (40 minutes)
- Total = 3 hours and 35 minutes.
Stop the timer every break for any other activity, such as having a coffee or replying to messages. This is very important because it is precisely there that people consume a considerable part of their time without realizing it.
We believe that we work or study all morning most of the time. However, when recording the actual hours in front of the book or the blank page, we realize this is not always the case.
Why Track Time?
I started registering my hours when I became a freelancer in 2002 and settled a home office. In those days, I provided consultancy in cultural heritage and charged by the hour. It did a bit of everything: listing dossiers, technical reports, exhibitions, surveys, mapping, inventories, etc.
In the budget, I needed to inform the clients of the value of my hour for that service and two estimates: the minimum and maximum hours I expected for that job. If I predicted too many hours, I might lose the client. On the other hand, the loss was all mine if I misjudged and spent many more hours than the contract.
So this is where time tracking became imperative. However, it is a habit that I have never abandoned, as this diagnosis brings us numerous benefits:
- Curating and prioritizing activities and projects: Understanding how we invest our time is the first step towards managing it better. Knowing how much time we spend on average on different activities and projects can help us decide which ones to prioritize and which to refuse due to lack of time. It is very common to put more things on our plate than we can handle.
- Self-knowledge: Time is a precious and scarce resource. The activities that take up most of our time tell us a lot about ourselves, especially what we consider essential. In addition, as we will see in this post, I register a lot of subjective information about my activities through tags. Therefore, for me, time tracking is a tool for self-awareness and identifying my values, skills, and interests.
- Realistic schedules: Our brains are not good at estimating the time it will take to perform certain activities. In general, we overestimate the time needed for tedious tasks and underestimate the ones that seem most fun to us. Everyone knows that feeling, like, for example, writing a report that took only half an hour but felt like an eternity. Or the morning just flies by because we get into flow reading a fantastic book. These experiences influence our memory about the duration of things. Therefore, knowing the exact time allows us to allocate our hours assertively.
- Evaluating the cost-benefit of the time invested in our activities: With time tracking, we can see who are the “thieves” of our time. Those activities that take too many hours and bring fewer benefits.
- Efficient management of teams and projects: In the case of management, time tracking helps in countless ways, such as distributing tasks. Managers can also use the tags proposed here to know their team better and allocate projects and activities more productively.
How to Track Hours?
There are several ways to register your time. The most important thing is accuracy and consistency. I started by simply writing them down on a sheet of paper and transferring everything to a text file at the end of the day.
Here are some options for doing this monitoring. I use, or have used, a little of each:
Paper and Pencil
If a paper and pencil on your desk are impossible to ignore or forget, go for it. Then just calculate the sums and percentages. Or, insert the data into spreadsheet software, such as Calc or Excel, to generate graphs.
Time Blocking
The technique known as time blocking consists of planning your day in advance, organizing it into hour blocks, in which you will carry out the tasks allocated for that period.
In addition to writing down the plan, it is also important to document the changes that happen throughout the day, as it is not an inflexible schedule. This planning can be done using planners or calendars, physical or digital.
The great advantage of time blocking is to make your hours planning visual. In addition, by recording what was planned and what was executed, it is possible to compare the ideal situation with real life. This analysis can generate valuable insights, improving the process of allocating tasks and hours.
Time Tracking Apps
You can use a simple stopwatch to record time.
Time management applications allow you to monitor them completely and practically, adding data manually or using the timer. In the latter, enter the activity description and then click play to start the count and stop to finish it. The hours are then registered by the app automatically.
In addition to the time recording feature, the apps also allow you to sort them by:
- Projects and Tasks.
- Colors (each project can have a different color).
- Tags.
- Customers for which tasks were performed.
- Teams or members who performed them.
Finally, the great advantage of apps is that they instantly generate detailed reports about your time tracked, presenting them in graphs, calendars, spreadsheets, budgets, and statistics.
Hourglass or a Stopwatch
I usually take 10-minute breaks for every 50 minutes of work. Then I get up to drink water or coffee and stretch my body.
When I’m not at the computer, monitoring my time directly on the Toggl Track, I set the alarm on my cell phone to let me know when the 50 minutes are up. This happens, for example, when I read a paper book or e-book on the e-reader.
In addition to the alarm, I also use an hourglass with about 50 minutes of sand. It allows me to get a sense of how much time is left for the break without consulting any electronic equipment. In this way, I avoid temptations and context changes. If I really want to have a coffee, but I see that there is little sand left to finish the reading cycle, I wait.
I chose an hourglass because I like this object and vintage things. Despite being a very digital person, I also have an “antique side.” After all, I research museums.
I establish an aesthetic and affective relationship with my software, systems, and productivity objects. In my case, this works as a strong incentive to actually use them.
However, if the reader has a more pragmatic profile, you may choose to purchase a stopwatch, a time timer, or a wristwatch that has a stopwatch to facilitate the time counting.
My only caveat is not to use the phone’s timer to avoid the temptation to open an app or the distraction of seeing a message. In fact, I leave my cell phone hidden in the office behind a wood sign that quotes: “Disconnect to solve problems.“
Keeping my cell phone out of sight is something I always do when working or having fun. The mere permanence of the cell phone in our vision field alters our behavior and ability to concentrate.
What Activities to Track?
Tracking every hour of the day for a few months is an interesting exercise for those just starting and have no idea where their time is going.
Or even when you intend to make some crucial decision, such as changing your job, field, or city. In these situations, understanding the routine can make a big difference.
In my case, today, I register only part of my professional activities, especially those over which I have autonomy, such as research and writing. In this way, the control can give me vital information in my projects’ decision process and management.
I no longer bother to track, for example, how much time I spend answering emails. I’ve already done everything I can to optimize my email. Therefore, there is nothing else to do but fulfill this obligation, which can take ten minutes or even more than an hour, depending on the day. There is no standard.
In my personal life, the only control I usually do these days is how many hours I spend executing my drawings. I make this register just out of curiosity because it’s a hobby.
Time Management System: My Own Time Tracking Method
I present below the time control processes of my personal management system. I currently use these applications: ProtonMail, Toggl Track, and Calc – LibreOffice (equivalent to Office Excel, I’m an open-source enthusiast!).1
These data support the decisions of my weekly, monthly and annual planning, which deserve their posts. I’ve already blogged about my Goals Board (translation coming soon). In this text here, I focus only on time tracking.
Blocking Time in ProtonMail Calendar
I start the semester by blocking my hours with a projection, which I call the ideal baseline planning, established according to what is going on.
When writing this post, I divide my hours into four main blocks already permanently marked on my calendar: priority, support, admin tasks, and recurring.
These blocks are registered in the ProtonMail calendar and sorted by color, which follows a standard applied to all my management tools, digital or analog. I will write a post in the future, explaining the use of colors in my planning system.
A description of the blocks follows:
- Priority (red calendar): Mornings, when I perform essential activities such as writing, reading, studying, researching. It’s my prime time, when I do deep work, and my productivity is peak. During mornings, my cell phone is on do not disturb, and I only receive calls from close relatives and friends, superiors at work (head of my department, board of directors, etc.), and the children’s school. Being under my control, I schedule no other activities, such as meetings. The exceptions are for the semesters in which I teach in this period. Saturday morning is blocked to write this blog.
- Support (green calendar): In the first half of the afternoon, I carry out support activities for my work, which are less tiring and demanding than the morning tasks. Examples of these activities are programming and Web development of my virtual lab, graphic design of project guidebooks, and including subjects updates in Moodle (learning management system used by my university).
- Admin Tasks (yellow calendar): Late afternoon. It involves bureaucratic or routine work, such as answering emails and students forums in Moodle, making phone calls, updating curriculum, generating reports and graphs, etc. I prioritize scheduling my meetings at this time.
- Recurring (orange calendar): Some activities that occur regularly, such as undergraduate and graduate subjects.
Based on the weekly planning, I time block my day at the end of the previous day. In the afternoon, it is possible to check the planning with the executed, comparing the ProtonMail calendar with the Toggl Track calendar view, as we have seen before.
Organizing Activities by Projects and Colors on the Toggl Track
For a few years now, I’ve been using the free plan of Toggl Track for my time tracking, a freemium software (paid version + free version) with integrated apps for desktop and cell phone.
Here are some examples of projects tracked in the Toggl: publications (each article gets its own project), research and extension projects (same thing), papers review for journals, boards, courses, events, readings (only professional ones), administrative roles and teaching.
I don’t count time in the classroom because this is easy to estimate by the subject’s plans. However, some things associated with teaching are eventually registered. For example, all graduate advisees are a project in Toggl.
In the case of administrative assignments, I document the activities (meetings, reports, etc.) associated with each role: museum direction, member of departmental chambers, committees, and commissions. The goal is to identify how much time each function occupies and, thus, decide which ones I can run for at each stage of my life.
Finally, I maintain separate projects for each of my fronts involving Information and Communication Technologies, such as websites, virtual labs, digital repositories, online exhibitions, etc.
Sorting tasks by tags: the most important part of my time tracking system
One of the most critical management processes for me is classifying my hours by tags. Toggl Track has a tags feature, making it possible to register tags associated with the hours tracked by the app. I divide my tags into some groups:
Journey Tags
This group registers how I felt while performing that task. It is crucial in my planning system because the journey matters as much as the destination. Same thing about the process and the outcome. These are the group tags:
- Neutral Hours: The activity did not give me any strong feelings. That is, I felt moderately good or slightly uncomfortable doing it.
- Pleasant hours: I felt especially satisfied doing those activities.
- Exciting hours: It’s the best possible classification, reserved for only those tasks that I felt really excited about during the process.
- Challenging hours: These are those painful hours in which I had to force myself to complete the task because I didn’t want to do it at all.
- Difficult to start: Activities that I procrastinated on or were tough for me to start. It took a lot of emotional energy and willpower to initiate them.
External causes can influence my perception of the journey. For example, if I am ill that day, those hours were perceived by me as difficult, not because of the activity itself, but my state of health.
In these cases, I don’t fill in the Journey Tags to not influence my stats. When I get better, I register them again.
Productivity Tags
This group documents productivity assessments, focusing on whether those tasks are leading me to the results I want:
- Flow: If I went into flow state performing that activity. Flow is a state in which our attention is entirely focused on what we are executing, to the point where we even stop evaluating our performance during execution. Generally, we go into flow when we focus on one activity without distractions; this activity is meaningful to us; this activity is not too easy, but it is not too far beyond our abilities either. When I get into a flow, I forget about my constant craving for food, problems, the clock, and even picking up the kids from school (don’t worry, my dear reader, I’ve set a daily alarm, so that doesn’t happen.)
- Mission: The activity meets my life mission. I will write about my long-range planning system at another time.
- Sense of Accomplishment or Contribution: I understand that the product or result of those hours contributes to my professional accomplishment and to the world. I mean, it is important for my satisfaction and for society.
- Sense of Urgency: That activity gave me an almost uncontrollable desire to do it immediately. In general, this happens with writing. I urgently need to write what’s on my mind to the point that, in some cases, I start writing the text on my cell phone because I’m on the street. In the old days, when I didn’t have children and my routine wasn’t so disciplined, I would sometimes get up in the middle of the night to write. Nowadays, I don’t usually give in to a sense of urgency, not least because an organized life demands discipline and priorities from us. But when this happens, I tag the hours with this one.
- Strategic Activities: These are activities that are not necessarily aligned with my mission, nor do they result in significant contributions, but which may be indirectly relevant to this. For example, I can accept the invitation to participate in a specific committee because I understand that this will open important doors for me, putting me in contact with some people I want to strengthen professional ties with. I would not accept this activity for the activity itself, but its opportunities.
- Unproductive Activities: Activities that I regretted having done, either because I didn’t get the desired results or because the cost-benefit was not positive. I frequently add this tag when I review all my tracked hours at the end of the year. However, sometimes I can complete this right away when I finish the task, and I realize it wasn’t worth the time invested.
Activities Tags
Activities Tags is the largest group and registers the type of activity I am doing in my tasks: writing, reading, researching, web development, programming, recording videos, mentoring, etc.
This year, I am detailing some of these activities even more. For example, in addition to simply Writing, I now have the options:
- Writing – Reflection: Prior preparation for writing the text, such as brainstorming, mind maps, flowcharts, indexes, summaries, structuring the project in Scrivener, etc.
- Writing – The First Version: This is the text written for the first time. It’s filling the blank page.
- Writing – Editing: Rereading, rewriting, and improving the text. Reading aloud (I do this several times, by the way). I hypothesize that I’m in this editing phase most of the time I’m writing. This year, I will find out if my impression is accurate.
- Writing – Review: This is the review I do of the text after reading it by other people, such as Portuguese or English proofreaders, peer review in journals, or my advisors on this blog. After this phase, I can return to rewriting (editing).
- Writing – Update: Changes I make to the text over time, aiming to keep it always up to date.
This metric is essential for didactic purposes, as I always explain to my advisees, students, and readers that writing well, in fact, means rewriting countless times.
Therefore, I believe that the survey of this detailed writing metric will provide exciting and enlightening results.
Time Tracking Reports on Toggl Track
Toggl Track automatically generates a series of reports and information from our time tracking. You can use different filters, such as period, team members, customers, tags, and projects.
Reports, which can be exported as PDF or CSV, provide the following data:
- Pie chart: This shows the percentages of hours tracked. Chart colors follow project colors.
- Bar graph: Distributes the tallied hours over the days of the week or months of the year.
- General table: Lists the projects, the hours worked in each of them, and the percentage this represents in the total hours of the filtered period. By clicking on the project, it is possible to check the exact data for each task individually.
- Detailed report: A table with all tasks and associated information: projects, tags, date and time, duration, and the user responsible for the record.
In this short didactic demo video, check out how I use Toggl Track. Soon I will provide a complete tutorial of this excellent tool here on the blog. Also, watch this Toggl Track Product Demo that presents the app’s main features.
Spreadsheets and Charts on LibreOffice Calc
At the beginning of the year, I transfer my hour’s records from Toggl Track to Calc and generate several graphs. I also insert additional metrics from sources other than those mentioned here.
In fact, I understand that my time tracking can provide more information for me, allowing me to identify patterns of behavior that can help in my management.
For this reason, I intend to develop a dashboard (visual panel with several metrics and charts) that provides me with this data automatically, not only at the end of the year but all the time, just like Toggl does. I’m still researching the best way to do it, and when I have something conclusive, I’ll share it on this blog with the readers.
Time Control Diagnosis
Using the reports generated by Toggl Track, its calendar, and the ProtonMail calendar, I analyze my hours in four moments:
- Daily: Five minutes, in the late afternoon, before closing activities and planning the next day.
- Weekly: Ten minutes late Friday afternoon before reviewing the current week and planning the next.
- Monthly: Twenty minutes, on the first day of the month, analyzing the hours and activities of the previous month.
- Annual: Beginning of the year. It can take several hours. It is the complete analysis, which involves generating additional graphs in Calc. Then, I reflect for days on the results and insights extracted from the time tracking.
Data Analysis Supporting Annual Planning
I intend to write in the future about my life and career planning system, but as far as the topic of this post is concerned, time tracking lets me know how much time I spend on the projects and activities that are most important to me.
Not only that, from my tag system, I can gauge how I felt along the way, what that represents in terms of results, what kind of activity I was performing when I went into a flow state or felt excited, and so on.
For example, some tasks can be classified as difficult to start, but in the end, surprisingly, they also receive the flow or exciting hours tags. This is definitely a stimulus to beat procrastination next time.
Certain activities classified as challenging hours, over time, migrate to neutral and even pleasant hours, demonstrating that overcoming the early stages of the learning curve pays off.
The objective of analyzing the hours and their tags is, ultimately, to map those activities that bring me the best cost-benefit and deliver me as much as possible the following advantages simultaneously:
- They are classified as pleasant or exciting hours.
- They carry me to flow state.
- They give me a sense of accomplishment and contribution to society.
- They involve tasks that I enjoy and consider myself skilled, such as writing.
- They are in line with my life mission, values, and priorities. (This is the essential point for me.)
- They bring me as many extrinsic results as possible, such as professional recognition, internationalization, exciting opportunities, awards, citations, financial and human resources, etc. (This is not the most critical aspect to me, really. However, as I am part of an education system that values these metrics in my promotion and evaluation process, I need to consider them seriously.)
By allowing me to understand where my hours go and what they have provided me, both in terms of quality of life and results, tracking time today is a vital management process for me.
Are You Feeling Terrified About So Much Control Presented in This Article?
Professor Ana, I’m not feeling well. This time tracking of yours is making me claustrophobic. I’m choking. I think I’m running out of air. I can’t breathe.
I heard something like that from a student at my university when I was presenting my time tracking system in a management class.
I don’t usually come out unscathed when I talk about my productivity processes. Some strong reactions my interlocutors always sketch. Some are startled. The vast majority likes to make jokes. I get all sorts of nicknames, and I take it all in stride.
However, I confess that this was the first time my organizing processes caused an anxiety attack in someone. At least as far as I know. And the student didn’t seem to be exaggerating. In fact, she was panting.
What I did was interrupt the class to make sure she was okay and make some things clear that I will also explain here, in case the reader is now opening the window to breathe better. Let’s go…
Confessions of a Former Procrastinator
Imagine an utterly disorganized architecture student who was often late for class and spent the night doing work the day before the deadline. Could you imagine?
That student was me! I often got excellent grades, but this came at a high personal cost, given my undisciplined life.
This topic certainly deserves a post in the future, but the fact is that no one is born organized. And I wasn’t. Today, I’m for sure. And, probably, I am less disciplined today than tomorrow.
If I could go back to the past, knowing what I know now, I would certainly do it differently during my college years. I was the opposite as a graduate student. I always tried to arrive on time and do everything in advance.
My point is: if you are a chaotic and procrastinating person, there is hope for you.
Different People Need Different Levels of Control and Management
Not everyone needs to track their hours. I know excellent professionals and highly productive professors who don’t.
This process depth depends on your profile, the volume of things you need to handle simultaneously, your area of expertise, your degree of assertiveness in managing your time and getting to know yourself. After all, there are many variables.
Analyze my time tracking system and pick only the parts that work for you.
I would say that most people would benefit from some form of time tracking, albeit a simplified one. However, it would be unfair to say that this complex level of time management that I adopt is essential for everyone. In productivity, there is usually no general rule.
Organization Processes Involve Habits That Take Time and Patience
Incorporating personal management techniques is a habit. It takes effort, patience, and time to assimilate effectively, like any habit. It’s been twenty years since I became seriously interested in organization processes. And I can still improve on a lot.
There is no age limit to start or finish. I will work on my systems until the end of my life. So take it easy, but go.
No one starts by trekking for five hours on a steep trail in the forest. We begin with a half-hour walk three times a week in the neighborhood square. Then, we increase the time and the difficulty, little by little.
Productivity is the same. As far as time tracking is concerned, start by writing down your hours spent in a notebook for a few weeks. Analyze the results, draw some conclusions, improve your allocation of hours and tasks.
So, start blocking your time in a calendar (time blocking). It doesn’t have to be in an app to reduce friction, especially for those who prefer paper to digital tools. Choose a good notebook or planner.
Are you comfortable organizing your day in advance? Maybe now you benefit from a little extra step, like counting your metrics in graphs and tagging your activities. Anyway, the reader already understands what I’m trying to say here.
Go slow and steady. The important thing is to get started. Take good care of your time one step each day because the clock hand never goes backward.
Downloads
I have a free account on Toggl Track only for tutorials and demos. With this account, I made this fictitious didactic examples based on my real experience in academic life.
Toggl Track – Fictional Didactic Example Summary Report (PDF)
Toggl Track – Fictional Didactic Example Detailed Report (PDF)
Toggl Track – Fictional Didactic Example Weekly Report (PDF)
Screenshot of Time blocking in ProtonMail – Didactic example (PNG)
Notes
Post published on my Portuguese blog on February 26th, 2022.
Last update: August 2022.
Please help me improve my English by submitting your suggestions through this contact form.
1 – Apps I use in my time tracking.
ProtonMail: It’s a freemium application (free version + paid version) for desktop and mobile with email, calendar, file drive, and VPN. I chose ProtonMail to manage my emails and calendar, as this Swiss company excels in the security and privacy of its users, having encryption features. I purchased the Plus Plan. I also have two free accounts, one for tutorials and demos.
Toggl Track: It’s a freemium application for desktop and mobile that allows you to document and control your hours. I’ve been using Toggl Track for years, and I have two free accounts, one for tutorials and demos.
LibreOffice Calc: LibreOffice is a suite of office applications equivalent to Microsoft’s Office. Calc would be similar to Excel. LibreOffice is free and open-source. My university has an agreement with Microsoft, allowing professors and students to use the Office suite. However, whenever possible, I prioritize free software.
Important: All software, books, and products suggested in this blog are chosen on merit and/or suitability. Therefore, there is no type of sponsorship or benefits for its indication.
Acknowledgments: Alberto Nogueira Veiga, Paulo Rocha, and all who gave me their precious feedback, thank you for your comments and suggestions. Also, I’d like to thank my English teachers: George W., Lutho M., Susan H. and Dr. Vince L.
Images: Laptop and Clock (Follow TheFlow, iStock), Coffee Time (Kaboompics, Pexels), Office desk (Burst, Pexels), Books and hourglass (Ana Cecilia Rocha Veiga), It’s all in the journey (Suzy Hazelwood, Pexels), Rewrite…edit (Suzy Hazelwood, Pexels), Put yourself at the top (Polina Kovaleva, Pexels), Girl lying on books (Q00024, PxHere), Just Start (Dayne Topkin, Unsplash).