hello everyone and welcome back to the bliss bean so today's video is going to be on what I think
is the most important thing you can do for your productivity and that is time tracking hopefully
that was dramatic enough so I think time tracking is a pretty self-explanatory term but just in case
it's basically tracking what you do during the day and how long it takes you to do each thing
and why do I think it's so important because other productivity techniques might promise
to make you more productive and you might feel like you're being more productive but you don't
really know unless you actually know how much time you're spending on everything so people do
this in different ways I know that some people use paper especially people who already have a bullet
journal it kind of fits in quite nicely with that system they might have a line going down the paper
and they write in what they did or some people use a grid based system where each square of a
grid represents like a 10 or 15 minute chunk and you just fill in what they did during that chunk
of the day some people use spreadsheets so like Excel or Google sheets they fill out their time
table and then they just put in what they did that does have the advantage of being digital
so you can take that data and do different things with it like having the spreadsheet
calculate percentages for you automatically or making graphs if you're a nerd like I am but I
don't like either of those systems because I don't know about you but my day is definitely not broken
up until a clean 10 or 15-minute chunks there are tasks that take five minutes for me to do that I
still want to keep track of and then also I think it just takes a lot of like manual labor to fill
everything in and have to remember to update your spreadsheet or update your paper grid so what I
use is my phone a lot of people who use apps for time tracking and the specific app that I use is
now then pro this is the best app I've been able to find this is not sponsored I just really really
love this app there is a free version called now then free and a pro version called now then pro
the pro version I believe cost $2.99 and as far as I know or at least when I bought it it was a
one-time payment which is really nice it's only available on the App Store though I'm sure their
Android alternatives of some other apps I've heard of there's this one called harvest and
another one called time camp I don't know about Apple or Android availabilities on those but I
have heard that those are other apps that serve a similar purpose so I'm going to take you guys
to this app and teach you how to use it the first tap here is called now and then the second tab is
called then that's why it's called now then pro get it okay so the first tab is called now and
this is where you do all of your time tracking so when you want to start a new task you just click
on the play button next to it what do you want to stop it you click the stop button or you can just
click right on the play button of another task and it'll automatically switch as you can see there
are also categories so I have the category of routines and within it I have my morning routine
and my bedtime routine in my school category I have all of the different classes I was taking now
I'll show you where you set up these categories so there's this plus button in the corner and if you
click that you can create a new task so you just put in the name of a task and let's do underwater
basket-weaving and then you can choose to make it like its own standalone task or you can put it
under another category so I'll just put that under school so now within my school category I'll see
underwater basket-weaving as an option you can do an abbreviation I don't want to do that and
then set a color and I always just let it set it automatically you can change it later you can move
it around to a different parent category you can add subtasks later you can also add subtasks right
here from this menu so I'm gonna add a couple I'll do research let's see gathering materials weaving
alright so now let's see what that looks like I go to school I've got this new category and all
these subtasks within it so I can click play on for example research but I can also click play
on the broader category if I don't want to track a specific sub task of underwater basket-weaving
the next tab is that the the then tab so let's see this is today basically this shows you like
a schedule a timetable and it takes all the data that you got from reporting your tasks
and it makes it into this color-coded blocked out schedule you can zoom in and out you can tap on
a task and see exactly how much time you spent on it and then another really useful feature is
obviously sometimes you forget to record task or you mess up or something so you can just add tasks
right into here so actually I forgot that I was up at 4:00 a.m. doing underwater basket-weaving
so I'm just gonna add that in real quick and then I can also click and delete there's also a weekly
view so as you can see it's really really cool and then there's a monthly view which I personally
don't really find use in because this is a little crazy it's kind of cool to see though the next
thing I'm going to show you is the chart view I don't use this a ton but it definitely is useful
because with any like planning system I think it's important to review your gathering all this useful
data but you have to look back on it to actually learn something from it so as in the previous
section you can switch from a daily view to a weekly view to a monthly view to a yearly view so
you can either view it as a bar graph or you can view it as a pie chart and then at the top
here this little sum symbol you can click on it to either group up your tasks by the large
categories or to break everything up into its smallest sub task so for example if I turn this
off you can see that I've got some blog tasks so social media and YouTube but if I click on this
then it groups all of the blog tasks into one big category and then another really cool feature is
that you can use filters and so I'll do an example of something I actually do quite often I like to
check up on how much time I spend on homework for different classes so if I go to filter by if I go
to school and then I say I'll just do this year so this is going to be second semester only and I set
this filter and I go to the yearly view I can see how much time I spend on each different class now
this is kind of annoying because it shows it all as orange but if you go down here you can see that
class I spent the most time on second semester with bio I hardly spent any time on biomed so
what I've just shown you might seem like a lot of work and you might be thinking why bother to do
this like I know I'm productive I don't need an app to see that I'm being productive and I just
like to try and convince you that even if you think you're super productive try time-tracking
because I think a lot of people have had very interesting discoveries where they realize that
where they thought their time was going is really not at all how their time is being distributed so
I'm just gonna break it down into the main reasons that I think you should time track number one is
it gives you a really accurate picture of how you spend your time so sometimes we have things that
we do that we think take forever but they really don't so an example is last year I was a layout
editor for my school's newspaper and that was a kind of job where I basically had a big monthly
task that I needed to do so that one week when we would do layout for the newspaper it would take me
like anywhere from 10 to 15 hours to put together the newspaper and so that week the newspaper was
a big part of my life but if I look at the month as a whole ten to fifteen months ten to fifteen
hours of working on it per month really isn't that much in the grand scope of things and so
time tracking helped me realize that my commitment to the newspaper it really isn't taking off that
much of my time and then conversely there are other things that we think don't take up a lot
of our time but they really do and that's usually distractions like YouTube for example watching
YouTube videos it honestly is amazing how quickly time escapes you when you're doing something like
that and time tracking really forces you to like confront how much time you're spending on things
like that another thing that time tracking helps with is it helps you plan your day better I think
time tracking and planning are intertwined when you plan out your day well and you set priorities
and then use time tracking to make sure that you really are spending time on those priorities and
not on distractions that's like a killer combo a third thing is time tracking will hopefully stop
you from multitasking I think we've all heard that multitasking is not truly multitasking you're just
single tasking while being distracted and the app limitation of literally having to input one single
task for any point of the day that really helps you focus more and it trains you to really view
your work time on a specific task as work time for just that task now of course there is some
ambiguity so for example sometimes while I Drive I listen to podcasts and driving and listening
to podcasts are two separate tasks that I have in my setup and so then I'm not sure what to put in
my advice is usually I try to think about it like this if I had to just pick one of these tasks to
be doing right now which one would I be doing and obviously it's driving because I have somewhere to
go the podcast part is just like an add-on but honestly like don't worry about it you don't
have to worry about the little details like that because I think it'll all balance out in the end
anyways and that's the kind of multitasking that you really don't have to worry about like driving
and listening podcasts I think is a great use of time another thing I think it's number four time
tracking helps you journal so I am someone who doesn't have a great memory at the end of the
day when I sit down to journal sometimes I don't remember what I did that day um and so then I just
open up my app and they literally have like a nice color-coded blocked out schedule of what
I did that day and I can use that to write out my journal entry cuz it like sparks memories of what
I want to write about and then lastly I think time tracking is something that fits in really
well with other techniques so for example I like to use the pomodoro technique which is 25 minutes
of working paired with five minute breaks and I really like doing that with the time tracking app
because I can really see like the 25 minute chunks spaced out with little breaks another technique
is the getting things done technique I don't personally use it but I have done a course on
it and I think that you could really find value in like flushing out your tasks and your projects and
then using time tracking to figure out how much time each of your projects and tasks is taking so
it is time tracking hard I don't think so I don't remember if I thought it was hard when I started
probably like any habit it's gonna be difficult to get into honestly once you do it enough it
just becomes ingrained in you like when I go on vacation I don't track time because I just it's
vacation but I still like feel this urge whenever I switch tasks to go on my phone and record that
and I even sometimes just open up the app out of force of habit I would say just stick with it if
you're not even sure if it's something you want to do just like test drive it for a week there's
no downside to doing it we've definitely learned something you met yourself in the process but I
think if you really make it like a life habit and you stick with it indefinitely it has a lot of
power to make you more productive so yeah that's all I have to say about time tracking I also did a
blog post on this topic I think a couple of months ago so you should also check that out I could talk
about time tracking all day honestly let me know if you found this useful if you're gonna try it if
you have any other methods for time tracking that I didn't mention on here I wish you the best of
luck in your time tracking and productivity efforts and I'll see you next time bye