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Welcome to Before Breakfast, a production of iHeart Radio.
Good morning.
This is Laura.
Welcome to the Before Breakfast Podcast.
Today's tip is that time tracking doesn't have to be all or nothing.
If you are not up for tracking all 168 hours in the week, you can track just some of your time.
This partial tracking can still provide insights about the parts of the week that you are most curious about or most want to improve.
I know some people are somewhat interested in time tracking but are also not that enthusiastic about tracking their time for an entire week.
Perhaps they think it will be tedious.
Perhaps they think they know how certain things look, which may be true, for instance, for work, if you do set shifts at a job or punch in and out at set times.
Perhaps people are busy and feel it is just one more thing to do.
But that doesn't mean that time tracking absolutely can't happen.
You can track just a part of your day or any part of the week that you would like to improve.
For instance, if your mornings tend to feel rushed and inefficient, you could track from the time you wake up until the time you get to work.
If you want to learn more about where your work time goes or why you feel you are never making progress on your professional priorities, you could track just your work time.
Or maybe you feel like your evenings have the potential to be a lot better than they are.
You could track from the time you stop work or the time your kids get home from school until the time you go to bed.
Some people feel disappointed by their weekends.
Maybe you feel like your weekends are consumed by chores and driving.
Or maybe you feel like you never get time for life maintenance tasks on the weekend.
And so, they just stack up.
Perhaps your weekends are full of adventures for your kids, but you're wondering if you could fit in something memorable for yourself.
Tracking your weekend time could provide insight into where your time is currently going.
Practically speaking, if you do decide to track just some of your time, you can still use a weekly spreadsheet.
You simply leave the blocks blank for the periods you are not tracking.
After you track part of your time, you can analyze and reflect on it just as you would if you had tracked the whole week.
You can look for patterns, time that could be repurposed for something else, activities you could do more efficiently, and so forth.
Now to be sure, there is a lot of value in tracking your whole week and seeing how your whole week fits together.
Sometimes spending time better is about shifting time from one activity to another.
So seeing the whole week laid out can be valuable.
Sometimes good time management really is about looking at all the puzzle pieces.
Your mornings are going to be rough if you are not going to bed on time the night before.
Maybe you are not going to bed on time because you are trying to score some leisure time.
Maybe that's because evenings feel unfocused until late at night.
Maybe that's because you don't know exactly when work will be done.
So we're looking back at the variable of quitting time to find out why you can't seem to run at 6 am.
But that said, if you know you are not going to track all your time, tracking some of your time could still offer some insights.
And who knows, maybe in tracking some of your time you may realize that time tracking isn't so hard after all.
You might just decide to track a whole week in the future.
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 lauravandercam.com.
Before Breakfast is a production of iHeart Media.
For more podcasts from iHeart Media, please visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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