- [Matt] I decided to time every single task for 30 days
from brushing my teeth, to folding laundry,
to eating breakfast, and doing my taxes.
I'm timing every task down to the minute,
and I'm doing it because I suck at time management.
I've always been terrible at planning projects
and I perpetually miss deadlines.
It's like clockwork.
I have an idea, I put together a timeline,
and I give myself way more time than I think I need,
and yet the deadline flies by.
- Didn't we do this yesterday?
- [Matt] I wanna explore
why we're often so terrible at planning,
how we can finally hit our deadlines,
and why that might involve picking up a stopwatch.
This video is brought to you by Squarespace.
I'll talk more about
why I think they're so great later on in the video.
First things first, I need a stopwatch,
but not one of these.
I wanna find an app that will help
make this process more painless,
and that can also give me weekly reports
on how I'm spending my time.
So I tried a dozen of the best rated time management apps
and found one called Toggle
that would work perfectly for this experiment.
So technically this app is designed
for work-related projects,
but I found that it can work equally well
for all of the tasks in my life.
Before I start a task,
I simply hit the little play button here.
I add a project, or in my case, a task,
and then I stop the timer when I'm done.
The calendar view allows me
to see all the tasks performed in a given day,
and the last tab shows me
a breakdown of exactly how I'm spending my time.
So besides getting a clear picture of
where all my time goes these days,
I'm also really interested to learn how long it takes me
to make a single YouTube video.
This is something that you would think I would know by now
after making videos for 20 years, but I don't,
and I think it'll really help me plan projects
in the future.
After a couple days of tracking,
I started to put together a pretty good system.
I thought that creating hundreds of unique tasks
would be really confusing and time consuming,
so instead of separate tasks for reading, meditating,
and watching TV,
I created one category of tasks called personal,
and I created other task categories including work, sleep,
preparing and eating food, quality time with family,
doing chores, weightlifting, playing baseball, hygiene,
and of course toilet.
So right when you open up Toggle,
you'll see your most recent tasks.
If I want to start a new one up again,
all I have to do is press
that little play button right there
and the task gets started, super simple.
This is helping me save time tracking,
but it's also giving me a more clear
and useful view of how I spend my time.
I don't really need to know
how much time I spend flossing every month,
which is definitely way more than zero minutes.
Douglas Adams once said, "I love deadlines.
I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by."
From small projects
to multi-billion dollar developments,
so many of us have issues with deadlines
that behavioral psychologists even have a name for it.
It's called the planning fallacy.
The planning fallacy is a cognitive bias,
first proposed by Nobel Laureates,
Daniel Kahneman & Amos Tversky,
and refers to the tendency for individuals
to underestimate the amount of time, costs, and risks
associated with future actions
and overestimate the benefits or rewards,
or put another way, we suck at setting deadlines.
We might fall into the planning fallacy
for a number of reasons.
It could be that we're overly optimistic
about how easy something will be for us.
I've made lots of videos before,
so this one will be a breeze
or we fail to consider unexpected events.
There is loud construction next door,
making it impossible to film your video at home,
or we lack relevant information.
Making a video about power lifting is very different
from making one about productivity, the list goes on.
In order to overcome the planning fallacy,
there are some things that you can do.
One in particular is called reference class forecasting,
which isn't nearly as complicated as it sounds.
Basically the next time that you go about setting a deadline
or starting a project, don't go with your gut.
Look at similar projects
that you've completed in the past first.
Analyze how long it typically takes you
to complete a project like this,
and try to fully understand the challenges
that you might encounter along the way.
This approach helps to ground your predictions
in real world data and experiences,
and that's exactly what brought me
to timing every task.
All right, so let me show you guys
what one full week of tracking looks like.
So this is a snapshot here of all of my tasks
that I've timed.
You can zoom in a little bit.
You can see here, family, work, family,
toilet, family, and so on.
I did notice something interesting the moment
that I started timing every task,
and it's that I became much more aware of
how I was spending my time.
Let's just say that when you start a timer
the moment you enter the bathroom,
you're less likely to spend 20 minutes browsing Instagram.
The very act of tracking was starting to change my behavior.
It's the same reason habit trackers, calorie counters,
and workout logs are so effective,
they're habits that keep your other habits going.
As extreme as it is to start and stop a timer all day long,
it was helping me stay more accountable
and bringing greater awareness
to how I spend my time each day.
But even so, the data was pretty embarrassing
after my first week.
So the one thing that really stands out to me one week in
is the amount that I've been working.
I logged 20 hours of work last week,
which is really bad.
Honestly, I knew that I wasn't working a lot,
but this is just like way worse
than I possibly thought it could be.
If I had a boss, I'd probably be fired by now.
The truth is that I've been struggling to get motivated.
I've been struggling with my role as a parent
and a business owner and trying to balance everything,
and so I haven't been doing as good of a job
as I would've hoped with my work,
and so I'm trying to get back on track.
That's why I am timing every task to begin with,
and the good news is now I have this
like baseline of 20 hours that hopefully I don't go below
and I can see how can I build upon this,
how can I change my behavior in the coming weeks
to improve the amount of time that I'm spending working?
Looking at the data,
one area that I knew I could improve was task switching.
I was doing it a lot, I'd work for a few minutes,
then help out with Frankie.
I'd get back to work, but then take a quick snack break.
Then I'd help out with Frankie again.
Eventually I'd find my way back to work
and have no clue where I left off.
So I started locking myself in my office
and committing myself to working
for at least 30 minutes straight
every time I started the timer.
I knew from past experience this was a really good way
to stay motivated and on track for short bursts of time,
and usually you don't stop at 30 minutes.
Once you get into a flow state, you keep working.
This kind of tracking is incredibly tedious
and it adds a layer of friction to everything that I do,
but I'd be lying if I said it wasn't effective.
I started to work more.
My working hours were more focused,
and I was more accountable to myself
than I'd been over the past six months,
but the biggest lessons were still to come
as I put together all the data for the entire month.
Since I'm timing everything this month, I thought,
let's start the clock on my Squarespace sponsorship
and see if I can fit it into 45 seconds, starting now.
I'm wasting time.
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Okay, maybe not a baby, but you get the idea.
(beep) I'm running out of time, and you can buy domains,
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directly through Squarespace.
All these things mean that I can come up with an idea
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Thanks for considering.
Alright, so I timed every task for a month
and I have my life represented in data
and I've really learned a lot from it.
Keep in mind that these numbers don't perfectly add up
to a 24 hour day
because I didn't do a perfect job of timing every task.
If you're curious, I logged 687 hours,
22 minutes and 28 seconds over the course of the month,
which means that there were around 33 hours unaccounted for.
I'll let you guess it in the comments
what I was doing during this time.
All righty, so over the past 30 days,
I have dedicated 39% of my time
or nine hours per night to sleep,
I should say attempted sleep
because this doesn't count the thousands of times
that I woke up to rock my son back to sleep,
but it does give you a clear picture
of how much time on average
I'm dedicated to sleeping each day.
Next up was family time at 31%.
That ended up being about seven hours per day.
This is really anything that I would qualify as quality time
with Nat or Frankie,
and when it comes to my business,
this was the area that I was most interested in improving
over the month,
I spent 14% of my time working.
That ends up being five hours and 13 minutes per weekday.
So I can definitely say that the adjustments I made
and the added accountability of tracking my time
made a really big difference over the past month,
of course, I was still disappointed
that I wasn't hitting the 40 hours I wanted to,
but then I realized why I'm working less.
It's because I'm spending more time with my son
and more time helping Nat around the house.
I think when I first started to see my low numbers
in terms of working hours,
I thought like, oh man, I'm only working 20 hours a week,
and now I'm starting to look at it like
I'm only working 20 hours a week?
That's amazing.
Like how cool is it that I've built this life
where I can step away?
I know that I wouldn't be able to slow down
as much as I am right now if I didn't work my ass off
throughout my twenties and early thirties.
So I'm just so grateful for young Matt for like hustling
and working really hard
because I really did set myself up
for this moment right now
where I can have a slower season of my life.
Let's quickly go through the rest of the tasks
for the month.
I spent 36 hours weightlifting.
This has gone up quite a bit over the past couple months
since I'm power lifting now
and I'm working on a video on the topic,
but weightlifting in general has always been
a non-negotiable for me.
18 hours of chores,
nearly 18 hours of preparing and eating food.
This is an area where I'm spending much less time lately
because I am subscribed to a boxed meal prep service.
It's just one of the small ways
that I'm trying to save time every day now
with the additional responsibilities of being a parent.
Close to 17 hours playing baseball,
18 hours of hygiene, six and a half hours of personal time,
or just 1% of my life,
this is another harsh reality of being a parent.
You just have very little time to yourself,
and finally, four hours on the toilet all month.
For the record,
I think my hygiene and toilet numbers are lower than reality
and account for my imperfect tracking I mentioned earlier.
Still, I think this is a really accurate summary of
how my time gets divided up any given month these days.
If you remember, one of the big questions
I had at the start of this experiment was,
how long does it take me
to make a single YouTube video?
And the one video that I tracked over the past month
was about how much sleep I'm currently getting as a new dad,
and from start to finish,
it took me a total of 54 hours to make it.
That was nine hours writing, 19 hours filming,
and 26 hours editing.
Now, this isn't gonna perfectly help me plan every project
in the future,
but it will help me get a better idea of
how to set deadlines going forward,
and if I continue to track my projects
and my videos in the months to come,
say, if I track 25 of my videos,
I'll have a much more clear idea of the average
to create any particular video,
and I can hopefully better plan my projects going forward
and miss less deadlines.
That's the hope, at least.
If you wanna try this experiment for yourself,
I have a few important takeaways that might help,
only track the important stuff.
My experiment was needlessly extreme.
It was fun for a short term experiment,
but the reality is that I only needed to track the things
I wanted to learn about.
If I were to do this again,
I might just track my work tasks and personal tasks.
Knowing that I spent four hours on the toilet all month
isn't exactly useful information.
Protect your creative time.
The more that you switch tasks
and allow for interruptions,
the harder it will be to get into a flow state.
This is really productivity 101,
it's something that I already knew,
but sometimes you need to relearn these lessons
over and over again,
especially when you have a significant change in your life
like becoming a parent.
And finally, just because something is easy
doesn't mean it will be quick.
I've made hundreds of videos in my life.
Making videos isn't really that difficult anymore,
but that doesn't mean that I can make one in a day.
It still takes time to sort through
the messiness of writing, filming and editing a video.
No matter what your area of expertise,
quality work can't be rushed.
By the way, if you wanna learn more about filmmaking
or building a YouTube channel with integrity,
then make sure that you subscribe to my newsletter
because I talk about that stuff there.
Go to mattdavella.com/newsletter to learn more.
Thanks for watching.