You can’t find time to work on your goals until you know what you spend your time on in the first place.
You might have a general idea of the things you spend time on. Maybe you spend a few hours on your phone a day, a lot of minutes hitting snooze on your alarm, or, if you’re like my little brother, at least fifteen hours in the bathroom.
It’s okay to have a general idea, but we’ve gotta dial in and know exactly how we’re using our time. And the only way I’ve learned how to do this is by tracking myself, and I’m gonna ask you to do the same. And no, you don’t have to download some overcomplicated app to do this, all you need is your notes app.
Here’s a snapshot of one of my time trackers, so you can get an idea of what tracking yourself looks like. Notice how I’m not checking in every hour to write down what I’m doing. I used to do that, but that got old really fast.
You don’t have to compulsively write down what you’re doing hourly if you don’t want to. Every time I start a new activity, I pull up my notes, write the time, and a few words describing what I’m doing now and what I just finished doing. That’s the gist of how I track myself.
Let’s say I started cooking breakfast after having read for some time. Before I start cooking, because I’m switching to a new activity, I’d check the time and write something like, “11:23 AM, finished reading. Making breakfast.” Then let’s say after I finished breakfast and cleaned up, I decided to watch TV. Since I’m starting a new activity, I’d check the time and write in my notes, “!2:36 PM. Finished breakfast, washed the dishes, and cleaned the kitchen. Gonna watch TV.” And I’d repeat this process with every new activity I start until I head to sleep.
Does that make sense?
Go to your notes and title it “Daily Activity Log” or “Daily Log,” and for 2 weeks, track everything you do. From the second you wake up, open your notes and log in the time. “6 AM woke up, getting ready for the day.” Go through your morning routine, and when you start something else, log it like we’ve mentioned. Do this for 2 weeks, and at the end of it, check over your daily log.
Now you know exactly how you’re spending your time. You’ll see patterns you unconsciously follow, a lot of time wasters, and big chunks of room for improvement. Once you’ve got the full picture of how you’re spending your time, the next step is to figure out what you can cut out entirely or spend less time on to make room for working on your goals.
Maybe you recognize that you have the habit of binging Netflix around 2:15 up until 4 every day. Maybe you recognize that you spend an hour and a half cooking, eating, and cleaning up after breakfast, mainly because you’re distracted by your phone. Maybe you go out for groceries and spend way too long there just browsing items.
Depending on what matters to you, you could use the time you habitually binge Netflix and use that for working on your goals, meal prep breakfast and use your phone less to cut back on the time you spend on that, and go to the grocery store with a list to get you in and out faster.
Now with the time you save, you can dedicate it to your goals.
Let’s say you decided to meal-prep your breakfast, and now that half-hour breakfast time drops to 45 minutes. Now you’ve got 45 minutes to go workout, read that book, film some content, study for that test, or whatever you wanna do. Let’s also say you don’t want to completely cut out the time you spend on Netflix and decide to watch from 2:15 until 3 instead of 2:15 to 4. Well, now you’ve opened up an hour to get some deep work in. And you can repeat this eliminate, reduce, replace process until you’re satisfied with the amount of time you’ve now made to spend on your goals.
Time management is crucial when reaching your goals and ultimately changing your life, but not many people know how to manage their time. It all comes down to knowing how you spend your time as accurately as possible so you can manage it and move things around. But nothing can be managed if you have no data to work with.
That’s why tracking the time you spend on daily activities is key to finding the time to work on your goals. Spend 2 weeks tracking yourself. At the end, review what you’ve found, and you’ll see endless space to structure your goals in time.
And remember, time is passing anyway, so you might as well start taking action, working on your goals right now.
This article was written by and originally published on https://www.reddit.com/r/getdisciplined/.