Archive for April, 2010

In late February / early March I decided to keep a log of my time for about a week – and it turned out to go for about 9 days. It was different having to record everything I do, and I think if nothing else it showed me how many things go on in any given day, and how many random tasks and interruptions occur in the midst of bigger-picture stuff.

Rather than getting carpal tunnel and boring the heck out of readers, I decided to summarize major notable points instead of re-typing everything.

The benefit of actually doing a time log is that you get to see read figures as to where your time is allocated on a minute-by-minute basis. You might find (as I did), that things are slightly different than you had previously anticipated – and that leaves space open to make real improvements in areas you didn’t know you had issues with, or areas you thought were closer to your ideas than they actually are.

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Here are the areas I wanted to look at, and the areas I will look to improve in the next time log project.

Driving: Here I wasn’t so interested in how much time I spent doing it (which I know if plenty), but more of what was I doing while driving. I like to make the most of my car time by rehearsing speeches, listening to audio, running through philosophical questions (inquiry), or making calls (mostly for business). Sometimes I just end up listening to music, which isn’t a sin but I don’t want it to be the norm because I could be making car time important (and though sometimes music is important in terms of lifting my energy and pumping me up for an event or something, it usually isn’t priority number one).

I drove a total of about 41 times. Within those 41 times I did different things while driving, sometimes I did more than one thing in one drive (like listen to music, then rehearse, for example).

Music – 17

Audio – 16

Rehearse – 5

w / Friends – 6

Calls – 9

Inquiry – 3

Visualization – 1

Clearly most of my time is taken up with music and audio, which doesn’t surprise me due to how easy it is to throw something from the iPod. The big change I want to see here is in far more rehearsals. I make a point to rehearse at least a part of a speech every day now, so my next time log should be much different. I’d also like to see music go down a little bit to make room for more rehearsals and maybe audio material. Inquiry and visualization are fun but not current area of focus.

Sleeping: I have made a point to not sleep much for the last year or so. Its one of the best decisions of my life from what I can tell. Here I wanted to track my actual hours of sleep and my naps as well.

Over the course of 9 nights I slept for 56:45. That’s an average of 6:17 per night. In addition, there were 6 total naps in the 9 days, amounting to an average of about :40 per day. This is not preferable. I’d prefer to see the sleep down to about 5:30 or 6:00 an the naps at a total minimum. These areas will be monitored as well.

Shower: Sometimes after a 4.5 hour Jiu Jitsu practice (running classes, teaching private lessons, etc…) I just want to “relax” in the shower forever. Its a waste of water and heat, and frankly there’s more important things to do – so I recorded my times in the shower.

Average shower time over 9 days was 12.8 minutes. I’d like to see that consistently be around the 5 minute mark.

Speech Rehearsal: Granted, in early March I wasn’t doing as many speaking engagements as I am now, but I wanted to make note of how much I actually practiced so that I can set a standard for myself.

Car Rehears – 5

(out of car:)

Under 30 min Rehearse – 4

Over 30 min Rehearse – 1

I would like to continue to see at least one rehearsal of around 45 minutes per week to just keep myself primed on my best material and used to speaking of extended periods. This also gives me time to perfect the way I communicate. I’d like to see far more car rehearsals, and I will time them next time.

Facebook / email: I have made a point to check these once, twice, or zero times per day. I don’t like to waste time bouncing to my inbox 20 times a day.

9 checks in 9 days. Thats actually just about the ratio I’m looking for. I can’t loose track of that stuff but I also can’t get too into it. Nice work here.

Average Time Reading: Sometimes I do more project work than I do reading (I go through phases like that), but its important that I get blocks of time to read within, so I wanted to track my reading time.

I found that I read 5 times, with an average of only 19 minutes per session. I need to see this number JUMP. The best method of doing so would be to block off larger chunks of time. 19 minutes does not allow someone to really sink into material, I’d like to see 45 minutes on average – at least!

Average Time Working Projects: Same as above. I want to know if I’m giving myself enough blocked-off time to really put effort into the projects that matter so much to my career and eventual grand-scheme contribution to the world.

I found that with 9 different instances of working on a project (about once a day), the average time spent working on a project strait was 28.33 minutes. Again, this is not adequate in my book. If I’m working on a speech or a presentation or my sport psychology independent study, I’d want to see much larger numbers on the board (1 hour at least).

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Craziness, this gives me a lot to work with and a lot to work on.

I have some distinct areas for improvement now, and the next time I work on this time log thing you can expect to see some huge improvements.

Until then!

-Dan