hello and welcome back to the bliss bean
i've been wanting to do this video for so long because as far as I've seen it's not something that's
super popular in the productivity community but I'm trying to like advocate it
because i think it's such a powerful techniqueand really transforms the way that you look at your
time so what is today's video about today we're talking about time tracking which means
you're tracking exactly what you do and how much time you spend doing it I personally think there are 5
main reasons why you should consider time tracking number 1 it will train you to stop multitasking
so i think we all know by now that multitasking doesn't actually work with time tracking
because you're technically only allowed to record one activity at a time whether it's because you're using
an app and you can only select one activity or you're using you're own system like a spreadsheet
you don't wanna end up with more than 24h a day because that just messes up your data so with time tracking
if you're doing it accurately at least you're literally not allowed to multitask anymore
another reason is you get much much better at estimating your time now as humans we are absolute
trash at estimating time and that's because of something called the planning fallacy when you think that things will
take less time then they will and also optimizing where we always think that the future
will somehow be better than the past so instead of allowing you to keep tricking yourself
like that time tracking makes it crystal clear how much everything takes and it can be
painful and inefficient you are at some things but you just have to view it as
a starting point for improving and getting better a third benefit is that you waste less time
when you're time tracking you really feel every minute that you're spending doing
something not productive os something you know you shouldn't be doing and so being aware of that
makes it harder for those minutes to slip away when you're watching tv or scrolling through your phone
or whatever is your vice now you might be thinking that this is a downside that time tracking
will make you to controlling over how you spend every minute of your day I've personally found that
time tracking has even helped me to enjoy my downtime more maybe I'll be relaxing and I'll be like
oh my gosh I've spend so much time relaxing I have so much stuff that I need to get back to but then I check my time tracker
and i realize it's only been like 20min so I'm like oh I'm fine I have nothing to worry about so with time tracking
you not only get better at working but I think you also get better at relaxing lastly if you are
a freelancer you should definitely be tracking your time because time is money which is not
to say that anyone at any other job shouldn't be checking their time but when you're freelancing
it's very important for you to know how much of a return you're getting on your time so for this next part of the video
we're gonna talk about how you actually do time tracking I think there are 5 main challenges
to starting time tracking and actually making it a habit so we're just going to
solve all of them we'll talk about finding the right tool for you so I'll show you what I use and some other recommendations
how you can make it fit your life and some examples of ways you might modify this technique so to set up
your categories because ow do you even begin to break down literally everything that you do in your life
how to get used to the habit I can give you some tips on that because that feels very weird at first
and lastly how do you actually make sense of all the data that you collect so starting off with finding the right tool
for you so i'm a really big advocate for this app called now then pro now obviously I'm not
sponsored by them or anything i'm just a tiny youtube but even though they are not paying me
i could go on for days about how much I love this app so when I first started doing this almost two
years ago actually i tried a couple different tools and now then pro was by fair my favorite it just
made sense to me it was simple it had all of the features I needed so if you're interested
in learning about exactly how that works and how I use it I have a whole video on that so convinient
i know i'm pretty sure there's a free version of the app and a paid version but it's like 3$ to get the
pro version so it's really not bad there are other apps to and I tried to do some research for you
guys and it looks like some popular ones are toggle, rescuetime, and clockify
another method for time tracking i using a spreadsheet so you can either make you own spreadsheet
or find a template online usually the way people will do this is they'll segment their day
into 10 or 15min chunks and then they literally write in what they did during that chunk
now i personally think this is just a little bit too tedious and time-consuming and also just not very accurate
theoretically you could also do this on paper but it's 2019 so just get an app
because you want a system that's actually going to allow you analise the data that you collect and if everything
is on paper you're going to spend more of your life sorting through those papers than you will actually
getting stuff done so my recommendation is definitely using some sort of app
then moving on to how you're gonna make it fit your lifestyle so the main way that I modify time
tracking to fit my life as a student is was that I didn't track my hours while I was at school
and that was just because the time that I spent I school was so unpredictable if that makes sense
like i would be constantly looking for little pockets of time when I could get other things done and not
necessarily what we were doing in class oops so during the school year I would track my time before school
during lunch because i had a whole hour to do whatever I wanted and then after school so then I think
its just important to remember that you don't necessarily need to be tracking all 24h of your day you want to be tracking
whatever you're trying to maximize so like maybe you don't want to track what you do
at work before you feel pretty good about your productivity levels at work but you want to make the most of the time that you're spending
at home you don't want time tracking to become a tedious shore you really want to think
about when is it actually useful for you to do this and only do it then
i'm gonna skip over the challenge of setting up the categories that you're gonna track because that's gonna be a long section
but for now we're gonna talk about how you get used to actually time tracking one thing to keep in mind is you should
definitely give yourself to free way in the beginning this is not really a very natural
thing to do so it's very likely you're gonna forget all about it in the beginning you just have like empty
chunks in your time tracking schedule and that is totally fine you just have to take a few days a few weeks
to get used to it if you suddently remember you haven't tracked for a few hours don't worry about it don't try to and go
back to fill everything in just start with tracking what you're doing right now and move on from there something that will
really help you to remember to time track is pairing time tracking with the Pomodoro technique
these 2 productivity techniques pair so perfectly it's like the holy grail of productivity
the pomodoro technique is where you set a timer to work for 25min you work for absolutely
no distractions and then you take a 5min break and then you repeat it that over and over and I've mentioned this
so many times in my videos so sorry if you're hearing this for the 100th time but this is so applicable to time tracking because
if you set a 25min timer to work on something that's really your queue
you should press the button to whatever task you're about to work on and then when the timer rings and you're about to take a break
you press the button to say that you are taking a break it just makes it so that you hardly need to think about when your switching tasks
finally, you just have to trust that it gets easier I've been doing this for 2 years and literally
i'm so used to it now that I don't time track while i'm on vacation while i'm on vacation or traveling but I still have the urge
to be opening the app and be switching the task I'm working on and be sitting down to dinner
ooh i gotta open my app and markdown that I'm about to have dinner now moving on to how
i actually analyse all of the data that you collect because you're gonna collect a crap tone of data honestly
i don't even have a system for sitting down and analysing how I spend every single minute of my life
i don't really think it's necessary i think the main benefit that i gain from time tracking is
just this awareness of time that i have but even though I don't have a set routine
for checking up on how i've been spending my time something I do do
do do is for my monthly planning pages in my artist of life workbook
by lavendaire which i absolutely recommend i will open up my time tracking app
and just get the data on what percentages of time I've spent on my big categories of tasks
so ill fill out a little post it with all that info and I'll be like "hum, am I happy
with these numbers what do i want to change with these so like for example I'm looking at may
right now and school was my number one category that month because of ap exams
i wasted away 13.5% of my life studying and sitting in those testing centers
as opposed to the 0% of time I normally spend on my school work in second semester
senior year so it's just kind of interesting to see how your life changes
each month and how your focus varies of course if you're into it you can get a lot more into the detailed numbers
but i think what i do is plenty so now finally we get to talk about how
to actually set up your app for time tracking I saved this for last because I wanted
to show you exactly how i do this and it's gonna take a little bit of time so figuring out your categories
is definitely an on going process as you continue to use this system and figure out
what works and what doesn't work for you just a few weeks ago I actually sat down and was like there's
a lot of stuff about this week that isn't really working for me right now so I simplified something made some more details
i also deleted a bunch of old categories that we're related to school because that's done
thank god so right now what i have works perfectly for me but probably it a few months I'll need to
change it up a little bit and that's totally fine so as I mentioned the pomodoro techinique
you take very regular little breaks and so I have a thing just for tracking those breaks that I take
in between my chunks of work time in my planning category, it's mostly just stuff like
weekly and monthly planning but also sometimes if I'm planning a trip or some sort of event
gathering if i'm working on doing some gap year planning or if I'm looking at my budget and stuff
all goes into the planning category in my school category I used to have every single one of my classes listed out
but now it's very simplified the routines category it's my morning bedtime and
photo organizing routine the food i feel like this might be a little bit excessive but
it only takes one more tap of a button and then there's also a category for planning so like if I'm looking
for recipes or making a shopping list for a recipe or a few things like that my blog
category is probably one of my most complicated ones so I've tried to really flash out
everything that i do i did make a pdf that you can download by clicking the link in my description
and it includes not only all of the categories that I use but also categories that one might want to use
so that's a really good resource if your just first time setting up your time tracking app
i've got driving whether it is I that is driving or someone else just transportation
basically chores getting ready my personal development only has one things
and that's for when i'm updating my resume I just didn't know where else to put it basically
for exercise i do like to keep track of the different kinds of exercise that I do for my relaxing
category i've broken it up into a few different things so like whether I'm just by myself or I'm
spending time with my family, reading a book, I also like to track phone time
separately because while spending time on my phone can be relaxing it's not the best use of my time and it can kind of
suck me in and so i just kind of want to be aware of how much time I'm spending on that specificly
my welness category has some more wholesome activities that I want to get into doing more often
like meditation writing and making art my social category involves a few
different things so like wether i'm texting a friend or hanging out with them in person it also includes
volunteering and stuff like that and also the time that I spend making cards for people and choosing gifts
my phot business category has gotten a lot more complicated it really used to be one single task
that just said photo biz but then I realized that if I want to get serious about this I should actually become serious about
how much time i spend planning shoots, taking photos, editing photos, my emails category
is for when i'm just like trying to clean out my inbox and not really focusing on anything specific
so like I'm not focusing specifically on answering blog emails I'm not focusing specifically
on photography enquiries i'm just trying to get my inbox down to zero
higiene category pretty self explanatory i've got a learning
a learning for category i've got a learning category and I've split up when I'm practicing
korean, spanish, reading non fiction books, listening to podcasts or watching photography or videography
tutorials i've got an errands category for a couple of random
adulting things that one just has to do I've got a nap category because even though I'm not really a
huge fan of taking naps sometimes it's just a necessity and then lastly this
money making category might sound kind of weird but basically my main source of income is my photography
business but i also do some other stuff like occasionally I babysit I work on listing clothes on poshmark
and selling them and also sometimes i help my parents with their business so ya
money making category ok so that's all the categories that I use I hope that was useful
or at least mildly interesting as i mentioned I did take the time to make a
very useful pdf for you the pdf just lists different categories and the sub-tasks that you might
set up withing them basically i just wanted to help you if you're just starting out with time tracking because
as i said setting it up can be the hardest part so what you can do is you can print out this sheet of paper
and like circle or highlight the activities that you do in your life anything that would be useful for you to
track than you choose your tool you set it up and you get time tracking so ya
the link to that is in the description I hope you find it helpful one last thing before I go though I did ask on instagram
if you guys have any questions about how I time track and I think I answered all of them I hope I answered all of them
but one questions that i did really want to emphasize was someone ask can it feel time wasting to plan your time meticulously
so i can honestly say that with the way that I do time tracking the way that I use it
it is only made a positive impact on my life I've never felt like it's been a waste of my time
to do this but it is something to keep in mind specially if you're starting out you don't want to make
this process so complicated so detailed that you're just making it more time and energy
consuming then it's worth after all productivity techniques should make you more productive not less productive
and so i hope this stuff that I've discussed in this video will help you figure out how to generally make
time tracking worth for you alright now I'm done talking I've literally been talking for
over an hour so i'm gonna go take a much needed break next week I'm very excited for this I'm making
a pack with me video for my europe trip where I'm only bringing a carry on and a personal
item so we'll see how that goes but it should be fun so until then please like the video and
subscribe to my channel and i will see you next week bye