Your time is your life. Master time and master your life. ~Alan Lakein
There are days you wonder where all your time went. But, when you develop the habit of tracking your time, you won’t wonder any longer, youknow!
The truth about how you are spending your days might shock you. But, armed with this information, you can more accurately identify areas where you need to make change and gain insight on how to budget your time better.
Both are necessary to experience a greater sense of control over your life and business. And, you’ll be a lot less likely to be easily distracted from your priorities.
Tracking your time is the easiest way to discover, change and enjoy your time. It doesn’t have to be tedious. There are many tools available to help you with it including this new one from Primaerp. It has just been released and you can experiment with it for free to test the fit for your needs.
Also, even if you are not billing customers for the tasks you are monitoring, you should track their cost based on your minimum baseline rate. (Don’t know what yours is? Read our eBook on Pricing to learn how to do this critical calculation.) I guarantee you this will be a tremendous eye opener for you.
Some of you may recall that last year I tracked my time for 7 weeks and shared the results with you. It was an exercise in monitoring my productivity ratio and assessing unproductive time during which I learned quite a lot about my own opportunities to improve personal efficiency and effectiveness. You will too.
Try it for 30 days yourself. Or even just a week if that seems too much. You might be very surprised by what you discover. (I know I was.)
PS I further recommend tracking both personal and work time for a set time once a year as a means of accommodating shifting priorities and reassuring yourself you haven’t slipped back into old habits. It does happen to the best of us. However, if you make this commitment to yourself you can regroup where necessary before too much damage is done.