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Track Your Time for Increased Productivity

Guest post by: Alex Revai

Article Overview: You are busy all day and spend long hours at the office. Yet, you can't ever seem to catch up. Where did your day go? In this article you will learn how inexpensive time-tracking software applications can help you gain control of your activities, your time and, ultimately, your life.

Track Your Time for Increased Productivity

Time-tracking applications, such as Chrometa, is an obvious choice for professionals and practitioners, who charge for their services at an hourly rate. However, we should recognize, that such a tool could also become invaluable, when we desire to gain control of our activities.

That time flies, is no news. We work long hours, yet, seemingly too often, we hardly ever accomplish what we want or need to. Where did the time go? We were busy all day, were we not? Of course, we were, but what exactly did we do? We may be hard pressed to give a detailed account. Yet, if we truly wanted to understand what took up all those long hours, we would need to get a report. Almost literally, a minute-by-minute report. And, that's precisely, what one can get with a time-tracking software application.

Having such a report in your hand, you could do the following:

1. First, sort it by the types of activities (or computer application programs that you used). I.e.: email, internet browsing, word processing, excel documents, other applications, phone calls, interruptions, etc. Keep in mind that a good time-tracking software allows you to capture and categorize time spent on non-computer activities, too.

2. Group the report by category and see the total time spent on each of them.

3. Then, sort the activities by total time spent, in a descending order. Thus, find the most time-consuming activities.

At this point you could step back, as it were, and ponder this unbiased report. What you see is not an impression of what your boss thought you were doing. It's not even your imperfect recall. It's just the accurate reality. Yes, you really spent 2 hours and 16 minutes "in your email". Yes, you were "googling" for the entire 1 hour and 43 minutes. Even that quick, no-brainer report you prepared in Excel, what you thought would be done in 15 minutes, took you 45 minutes. And so on...

Now, the results may not exactly be what you expected. In many cases, they may surprise you. A little time here, a little there, adds up quickly.

Tracking of one day, of course is not exactly a statistically representative sample. So, keep recording your time spent for a week or two. Armed with some meaningful period of history (say 2-3 weeks) you can begin the process of taking control of your activities, your time and...your life.

Once you have an objective understanding of where your time is spent on a daily basis, you are in an excellent position to making lasting changes. Follow best time/task management practices, such as summarized in my article: "Time Management & Productivity: Can You Really Manage Time?" You will quickly develop focus and discipline in accomplishing your most important business and personal objectives. Don't forget to keep on tracking your time as a way of getting useful and usable feedback on how you are progressing.

Start using the extra time, which you will hopefully free up in your calendar, for real value-generating activities...and start charging for it, by the hour. Now, that's money in your pocket!

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Article Tags: billable time, productivity, time tracking, wasted time, where did the day go



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