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Welcome to Before Breakfast, a production of iHeartRadio.
Good morning.
This is Laura.
Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast.
Today's tip is to try acting like a lawyer or an accountant for one work week.
Track your time and think of yourself as billing it to different projects.
The experience will likely be enlightening and give you some ideas of how to best spend your working hours.
So I have spoken with lots of lawyers and accountants over the years.
Many have told me about having to bill their working hours to different clients.
That means tracking their time, often in small increments like six minutes.
That is one-tenth of an hour.
These tend to be highly paid folks, and six minutes for a $500 an hour lawyer is $50.
Still worth noting.
I can tell you from these conversations that basically no one likes tracking their time in six minute increments.
Now, I know that often this distaste stems from billable hour requirements.
Knowing that you have to clock a certain number of hours can lead to a loud ticking sound in your mind, especially when you know that any time off is just borrowing time from the future.
But even in the absence of that, or even if the billable hour target is quite reasonable, it can feel like a pain.
And yet, I am always telling people to try tracking their time for a week.
Indeed.
Every year, I lead a time tracking challenge around this time, with thousands of folks tracking their time together.
You can learn more about that over at my website, lauravandercam.com.
For a week, people act like lawyers or accountants, keeping track of their time.
So this raises the question if no one who has to do it likes doing it, why on earth are thousands of us doing this to ourselves?
The reason is that it is incredibly useful.
I suggest people try tracking all their time for a week, that is all 168 hours of a week.
But even if you only track your working hours as lawyers or accountants do, you will find some interesting things.
One thing you will see, how many hours you actually work.
Now, if you get paid by the hour, you know this number.
If you don't, you may just go by an impression.
We think 40 hours means normal 9 to 5 in the office.
But it's only sort of true.
Most people take breaks.
Sometimes people come late or leave early.
Sometimes people have half days or holidays or sick days.
It might actually be less than 40 when you average it out.
This nebulousness happens with higher numbers, too.
If you ever work late or check email on the weekends or travel for work.
You might just assign some other number to this question.
I work 50 hours a week?
60?
80?
We live in a competitive world, and this number can quickly get inflated.
I once met a young man at a party who told me he was working 180 hours a week at his startup.
That is a very impressive number if you actually multiply 24 times 7.
I used to think I worked 50 hours a week, and then I started tracking my time regularly.
I realized that the average was a lot lower than that.
These days, I know it is usually around 35 hours a week.
I work in the evenings.
I work in the early mornings.
I work on weekends.
But my work days are often interrupted and end early due to kid stuff.
So the time doesn't add up nearly as fast as I feel it does.
If you track what you are doing or working on during your working hours, you will also find some interesting things.
Many people try desperately to do multiple things at once and wind up getting very little done.
Or they keep getting distracted and find that a 10-hour workday contains less than 7 hours of real work.
Sometimes people see that they spend the majority of their time in meetings and not all of those meetings actually needed to happen.
I have certainly seen folks get a fire lit under them to minimize meetings after realizing that if they want to work 40 hours a week and they spend 25 hours in meetings, then they have a mere 15 hours to do the rest of their jobs.
But in any case, when you know what your work week looks like, you can make more rational choices about what proportion of time you should spend on different things.
You can decide to spend a certain proportion on planning or on drumming up new business or on meeting one-on-one with direct reports.
You may generally think you should be spending more time on these things.
But unless you know exactly how you spend your working hours now, you don't know if you are spending too much, too little.
The right amount.
Who knows?
Time tracking is just data.
Data is really another way of saying reality.
Or if we want to get all lofty, the truth.
I believe that the truth sets us free.
When we know where the time is going now, we can make more rational choices about how we want to spend our time.
So yes, perhaps time tracking is not a ton of fun.
Though I have been tracking my time for almost nine years now, and that's all 168 hours of the week.
It's enough time to rival many lawyers or accountants.
I find it fascinating.
Absolutely fine.
I keep doing it because time is valuable.
I want to spend this valuable resource well.
I am guessing you want to do that too.
So why not try acting like a lawyer or an accountant for a week?
Keep track of your working hours and what you are doing.
If you are inspired, you can track all your time. working and non-working time.
It really won't take that much time or effort.
And you'll have data that can help you spend more time on what matters and less on what doesn't.
In the meantime, this is Laura.
Thanks for listening.
And here's to making the most of our time.
Thanks for listening to Before Breakfast.
If you've got questions, ideas or feedback, you can reach me at Laura at LauraVanderkam.com.
Before Breakfast is a production of iHeartMedia.
For more podcasts from iHeartMedia, please visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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This is an iHeart Podcast.
Guaranteed human.
