I used to do this when a micro manager challenged how I was doing my job. I used an app on my phone and built up the categories as I went. It took about a week to get used to it but once the habit was there it easy to maintain. Since a lot of my job was management and dealing with staff issues it meant that the "ephemeral talking time tasks" could be accounted for. The app let me extract reports as pdf. So the next time I was second guessed I had the data to support my position.
Maybe it could be interesting to compare your calendar blocking and time tracking tables? So e.g how many hours were you planning to spend on a task, and how many did you actually spend doing that thing ^^
I’m a teacher in a secondary school and really want to time track as a mini project about teacher workload. Been wanting to do it for ages and this has given me the motivation to track what I do as a teacher in real time over the next autumn term!
As a legal aid lawyer, we have to time record each unit of 6 minutes, with the idea of 6 hours of chargeable work a day. We round up so technically even your three min tasks are counted! It is a complete nightmare without a system that can time stuff for you but luckily ours is quite good. We then have targets per month, which can be a bit grim. Sometimes it feels like its helping productivity and sometimes it feels like a right faff and the pressure takes away from what actually is important in the work. It also worries me about how we will ever get to move to the four day week and it does warp your brain a bit in terms of what you value. I am really good at my 6 times table now though!😂
Honestly the most fun thing about this video is discovering that there is such a thing as too much data for Hannah Witton! I use time tracking all the time as a freelancer, and because I get paid different hourly rates at my day job depending on what work I do. I’d be curious to track things like leisure, self care, or exercise for myself.
So, I've been using toggl for work since I finished Uni, for a few years now. Looking back, I even did a time-tracking / diary thing at Uni in the months I spend on my bachelor's and master's thesis. I just needed to write down, what I did that day in a few words, because a day or a week later I would have had no clue what I did, so it's a nice habit. Also I just wrote down my start and endtime during the day to get an idea how much I am working. I struggle with my sense of time and my focus (I suspect I have ADHD), so I really depend on those tools, when I don't have an outside structure, like classes. I can't plan ahead because of that lack of sense of time, so I really enjoy seeing hard numbers looking back. I totally understand that you hated it because its really nitty-gritty and unnecessary, when you alredy do well with calender blocking. At work it helps me a ton to write down what I am about to do as a task and then start the toggl task timer because this way, when I get distracted by noise or my own thoughts I can look to the right on my toogl screen and see what I was doing. It also helps me to realise, when I should take break, that's usually the case, when I start skipping between tasks and have to start the toggl task clock anew several times in the span of 10minutes. Then its time to take a nap or go for a walk or eat lunch. I am also obligated to report how much time I spend on which customer project for the bills, thats why toggl's project function comes in handy. All in all, I am a big fan.
I also have ADHD, and I now want to try to use it to see how long I spend on things in the week. I'm often not aware of time passing, so I don't know if meal prep tonight took me 30 minutes or 2h, and it's quite annoying when I want to plan things. I tried to use calendar blocking when I had an office job, and I wasn't really successful at it, but it was nice to be able to go back to my calendar when I was losing focus and be reminded of what I was supposed to do. Or just move the thing to later and do the task I actually wanted to do. But i used it to time track as well, like I would plan out the day and go back to my calendar when I was switching tasks and adjust how long the task had actually taken me. And sometimes i was really surprised. I've read that Toggl has a Pomodoro timer function, which (the Pomodoro method) I have found soooo useful when working an office job. Honestly, people were taking no breaks at all, just working 7 or 8 hours a day, Monday to Friday, with no breaks. Taking regular breaks (honestly, I was just going to the toilet and scrolling on my phone for a minute or two) helped me so much and made me so much more efficient and happy about my job. I'd recommend it if you haven't tried it yet! Honestly, just understanding how my ADHD brain works has done wonders to my productivity and happiness when at work, because I can just find solutions for my problems. It helps with knowing where to look. So good for you for finding a tool that helps!
Since I went back to work from maternity leave, my partner has been tracking how many mornings, evenings and weekend days we each spend looking after or being the ‘lead parent’ with our son. I do an office job full-time but my partner is a freelancer who works a lot of evenings and weekends. This is her way of trying to ensure the childcare is split as evenly as possible between us and that she does as close to her fair share as she can. At the moment it’s just tracking 0.25s of a day in an excel spreadsheet, so not a perfect system but it’s been really interesting to see the actual data of how our hours stack up and not just how it might feel after a particularly tiring week.
I used to be a consultant, so I did time tracking for about 10 years … before there were good apps for it 😅 I made myself an excel spreadsheet that I could put the times, project #, & task notes in and it would automatically calculate times & fill in a bunch of charts to make billing easier. I often worked odd hours, so it was especially helpful for knowing when I was reaching the weekly project limits & knowing how much time was spent on individual bugs/change orders. I was often in the unique situation on our teams of billing to multiple projects at once … most people had 1-2, but I often had more than 5 because I specialized in security & it touches every aspect of a program. It made it really important to differentiate between my time.
I could imagine that time tracking would be really interesting in a more company based environment. Like I have a lot of different projects/functions at my workplace and it would be interesting how many hours I pour into each of my functions.
I think I've been doing a calendar blocking/time tracking combo. Like I have my consistent daily things and then events or appointments that I can schedule. And then a couple times a day, I'll check my calendar and update the times based on what I did and how long I actually did them. If I let myself get so granular that I'm trying to track every minute of my day, I would literally never get anything done because I would be so focused on the clock. That said, I do use a color code system to denote the importance of each thing rather than sphere of life (so work and doctors are one color because I cannot miss them, my routines are another color because I have more freedom of when I do them, and then things I want to do are another color so they stand out but don't guilt me if my feelings change). It makes things really easy for me to review without getting hung up on the specifics, as much as I might appreciate seeing the data.
I would love to see this as compared to when you worked 40(ish) hours a week - do you reckon everything directly scaled up (i.e., if you spend 30% of your time on brand deals now, was it also 30% when you worked 40 hours a week) or do you think when you were working more hours there were different things that took your time?
So interesting. I don't use such granular categories, but my therapist recommended time tracking to me for my whole day and to capture how much I'm sleeping and I've been doing it for like 3 years now in a basic excel spreadsheet. And for me, I find time blocking more stressful because I don't like facing how often I change my plans.
This! I have tried to calendar block, and while it can come in handy on occasion (when I need to protect my time from folks who will just schedule willy-nilly), I have such a hard time using it for task management. I think I'm going to try Toggl, but honestly your spreadsheet idea sounds just as good.
The book "168 hours: what successful women do before breakfast" is a great read, where she ends up deculpabilizing women & helping us recenter our priorities. A nice read!
I had to track my time at a job once where I was doing bits and bobs for a whole bunch of different projects, so I had about 40 different tags for the different tasks I did. Tracking it was horrible, but one of the admin tags included time spent time tracking, and I always got a little kick out of using that one :-)
SO interesting to hear about your work time distribution! ❤ And yeah I see that it’s exhausting to be tracking everything. Tried that once myself, didn’t even last two days. Kudos to you for making it through all those weeks!
Hey Hannah! You should look up Laura Vanderkam's 168 hours for 'whole of life' time tracking. She recommends a less detailed approach where you make a note across half hour increments, rather than minute to minute. She also suggests just taking time every few hours to go back and fill in the time log, so you're not disrupting the flow of your day doing it. V interesting!
I used to have to do this for some projects and I absolutely hated it. So good on you for trying it. Oh side note that outfit is super cute, really knocking it out of the park.
I kinda track my time and do calendar blocking at the same time? I calendar block planning my time, then during the day i keep fixing it to look like what i was actually doing with my time.... But its reaaaly chill and not too specific and accurate lol
I work in customer service and recently started doing time tracking at work (I was selected to trial it for the team). It's been pretty challenging because a large part of my role is answering the phone and then doing a variety of admin tasks in between calls so I have to keep stopping and starting the timer again when a call comes in. However, it has been so helpful in providing evidence to managers on how much time we're spending on different areas of work & hopefully will demonstrate that we could do with an additional member in our team! 🤞🏻
I would love to see a video on how you typically organise all your different projects and day-to-day/regular schedule. As someone who also loves to have a plan, seeing how you do it would be very cool!
Time tracking seems like something that someone like me (really into planning and data collection) would love, but in reality it is NOT for me. My course of studies (translation) implies doing lots of different projects/activities, which is so bothersome to track. I only use it to track at the beginning of the year how long it takes me to read some longer material (novels, plays, etc.) to know how much time to allocate for that in my planner
At the beginning of the video I thought it'd be a good idea to do the same, but when I finished watching I was just thinking I'd never manage (besides sounding boring af). I have ADHD and stopping to track everything I do wouldn't be productive because the potential for distractions increases tenfold. I started calendar blocking because of your video and that is enough for me, really. As for how I thought your time would look like l imagined you'd spend more time on admin than you actually do. I was under the impression you did soooo much admin 😂
As someone who for 7 years had to track their time as an auditor (billing to customers) I will never go back. It was so bad for my mental health travking every minute i was working (I had an app that ran like a clock on my desktop and could see exactly how much i worked). I felt guilty if I hadn't worked enough hours and guilty if i worked longer as it was less time with my family/for me. I now have a job where that isn't the case and it feels so liberating as travking time made me feel like efficiency wasn't rewarded as you had to find something else to do.
Time tracking is one of the reasons why I hated working as a project manager. I was managing between 30 and 50 smaller projects at the time and had to track every phone call and email, which I often forgot when I was in the flow and at the end of the day spent like 30 mins trying to remember on which projects I spent how much time.
So a while back I was also curious about where my time was going and how much I was pouring into each of the categories that make up my life, and the app Boosted worked great for me! Instead of inputting each task separately and tagging it, you just press play on either one of the projects you've set up (e.g. work, errands, relax) or a recurring subtask within it (for example, under "body maintenance" I had morning/night routines and also, yes, showering, but in my defense I was depressed and basic tasks were an accomplishment 😅). The start/stop tracking mechanism makes it much easier to catalog those tiny 3min tasks, although like you I think I still got tired of tracking things so extensively after a while. (But that's on me, and then I switched to a less-precise tracking system on paper, which I kept up with for yeeears and only stopped because life got incredibly hectic very suddenly. I should really start it up again, though, it was incredibly useful.) You can also input things after the fact, so if you just do really broad categories and intentionally imprecise time units (e.g. "work = 8 hours, walk = 40 min, Rowan/Dan time = 3h (of which pure Dan time is like 30min), you could accumulate really useful data by just logging things once or twice a day. If I recall, the analytics tool was also fairly robust, so hopefully you wouldn't have to do the pie charts yourself. Great video as always, love this channel!
I’m a teacher and we don’t really have contract hours (well we do but it’s not being tracked so EVERYONE works over time unpaid most days). I decided to track it for me and I wish I had stayed oblivious 😂
As an accountant who has to fill in super granular timesheets every day I feel your pain! I always end up sticking at least half an hour down to miscellaneous "admin" because otherwise it's so hard to keep track of all the little 2 minute tasks in between bigger jobs.
This is a bit of a random comment, but watching you talk about the time spent researching for Hannah Witton and Friends reminded me of the general dilemma you've expressed around 'refilling the well'. I don't know if this has been suggested before, but I would find a video of you reading one of your sex books and then talking about it really interesting :D So the research time could be spent just reading, and then the video could be like a mini reading vlog, your thoughts on what the experience felt like, and what you thought of the book :) Sorry this is a bit random hahah, the thought just popped into my mind and I wanted to share - and also to say that I love your content and have been a viewer for many years now
Zooming out can be easy with calendar blocking, at least I use calendar blocking for both work/studies and leisure. Then you'd only need to calculate average outside/travel and remember when you were outside taking a walk, where your diary keeping comes in 😊
I have to do time tracking at work for projects/billing clients, and it is exhausting, I end up doing 15min increments, and I'm not accurate about time spent on a client if I'm responding to multiple emails from multiple clients in bulk! I found it easier to track in writing by creating my to do list for the day, then writing next to each task how long I spent on that task. At the end of week, i logged my time online by referencing my notes. I found that writing was less disruptive than tracking directly online as it meant I don't need to open a browser/switch tabs on my computer when i finished a task.
I time track for billable hours, which is much easier than this. I don't change tasks frequently. I'm usually working on 1 project for multiple days at a time. I also use the pomodoro method, so most of my time is tracked in 30 minute chunks
we (have to) use a time-tracking tool at work (for the bosses to know how much to bill our clients bsically), and some people find it really stressfull and they struggle at the end of each month to filll theirs out, but I love it but we do have a 15-minte rule = a task ist only worth recording, if it takes the majority of a 15-min time-bracket... (if you do a lot of smaller stuff you'll record it in 1 entry "bit and bobs" or smth) --> that way you dont use half of your time tracking
I totally understand how frustrating it is to input every single little thing, but it was still a good experiment. In terms of travel, I am sorry you didn't track your commute - home to studio including the stops each way at the child-minder. I've found that in my working life, the commutes are often what ruined things for me, either in the time they too or just the realities of travel - unless, those rare times I was able to walk, which was relaxing and helpful, unlike driving or taking public transport. Commuting is a huge time and energy gobbler.
I'm an hourly contractor, so I do time track... but I'm not stop/ starting it every time I get up to go to the bathroom or make a snack, because if I was salaried I would be getting paid for those moments also... And if it's a quick task that took me 5 minutes or less and I didn't start the timer, I usually just go in and log 5 minutes on Admin or whatever. I bill in 15 minute increments so all those 5 minutes add up.
I'd be curious to know how much time I spend on things (but maybe not knowing is better) but I just can't imagine doing this. I don't know if I have ADHD or not but staying on task is damn near impossible for me and I keep skipping from one thing to the next or trying to do multiple things at once. And at my actual work, even if I want to focus on one thing, I have to keep switching to doing different things because of the people around me. Which is often frustrating and makes things take longer.
We had to do I think a week of time tracking everything in our lives for a high school econ homework. This was done old school in an excel sheet (in the 2000s) :D I did find it interesting :) I enjoy time tracking although it has gotten harder since my kiddo's here. (1 now)
I loosely time track for my job with CT. They never check on it ( because I’m salary) but it’s more for me to see what I spend my time on and make sure I hit my weekly hours goal. I’d hate getting too granular, so I lump little things together. I use Notion which makes it more fun because I love Notion.
@@morehannah I use a table with columns for tasks and time spent, and it automatically converts to minutes/hours and adds up my time. I generate a new table from my template weekly and archive the old ones.
I’m in the same boat as you where I’m supposed to time track for work but I hate it. I never remember to do it, it takes too much time, and it’s so subjective it makes it feel meaningless. Agree with everything you said lol
I was working remotely for a German company which was using a time tracking up for all remote employees. I could never make it to be honest and I was doing great with my job post. Productivity is usually messed with hours of working but it is not the same!
I have to timetrack for work because I work on a lot of projects for a lot of different clients that all need invoicing, so I'm very used to it at work. I'd be torn about tracking the rest of my life. On one hand, I have ADHD and so have a poor sense of natural time tracking. I think I would do it temporarily to then evaluate my goals (e.g. spend more time outside)
As a paralegal I am *required* by my job to track all of my time, down to the tenth of an hour (every 6 minutes)- essentially recording the time that I spend working on each particular case each day. It's stressful to get used to-I'm often working on 7-12 cases in a typical day- but there are proprietary softwares for it in the legal industry in the U.S. (Lawyers also must track their time.) I can't imagine doing this voluntarily 😅
Time tracking seems cumbersome if it has to be done manually. Depending on how one feels about AI, cyber security and robot uprisings I could imagine new smart trackers could help, which can automatically analyse this and maybe only ask about a few things at the end of the day to confirm/review. I'm fascinated with medical and social technology, like smart toilets, but also recognise that they could be manipulated by individuals or movements.
I am a data nerd, if you can give me some data to look at I will be happy, so a leisure time split recording, or a time tracking app comparison video would be very interesting to me!!
Poor you for feeling like you had to stick to it for 6 whole weeks 😅 All for the entertainment 😂 I would have been interested in how long you spent on feedback, since you don't do the edits yourself, would be interesting to see how much of your time it still requires.
This would absolutely not be for me, already depressed about how many hours I spend working- wouldn't want to see it written down 🤣. A side question! If we skip over the 'ad' part of a sponsored video do you lose out?
yeah i was like why did u do this for 6 wks if u hated it haha but it makes sense that u would want more data bc then it might reflect more accurately than like a week or two possibly? haha love the pie charts tho!
I time track any partner work as they have pre-paid support hours and must pay for any overages. Because it can result in payment, we use a browser extension that we can turn on and off. Each partner has a project for each product they use, so i can mark that i supported X partner on Y platform for Z amount of time. It IS tedious, but the worst is when i get into a project and realize halfway through i havent been timing it, so i have to guesstimate when i started. Thankfully usually thats pretty easy to get right (based on end of last meeting or end of last tracked item). I could not imagine trying to do it for my everyday life though. Absolutely not.
I time track (loosely) because I'm paid hourly and over time is NOT paid (I'm a civil servant). So I want to prove my manager that if I come one hour late it's because I overworked one hour the day before. Also I do three main task and I need to know how much time I spend on each task.
I tried Rize for a bit and only stopped because its quite pricey. It worked well and eased my anxiety that i wasnt doing enough work time, it actually taught me i domt procrastinate as much as i did. Recommend even for a trial period, super low maintenance!
Time tracking is pretty much *never* for the workers or have to do it; it's always for either management "evaluation" or for client (or vendor) billing or for task-specific tax write-offs...
Did trackib your time influence how you spent your time while you were at it? I tracked my time reading for a month and the trackib made me read for longer chunks as I became aware I would be at it for 5mins, grab my phone for 3mins, then go back to book.
So interesting how you spread allocated 24h of work across 4 days. I work 24h a week but for me these are 3 days of work. I wonder if you'd be able to do it in 3 days or if that would be too stressful. 🤔
What about tracking how much email is for different projects? You could use similar categories to Toggl and also compare received and sent…maybe that would be too short a video?
Not to the same scale but European NGO fundings ask for this beautiful thing called time sheets. A ridiculous report on how you used your time DAILY on a project. In order to justify you deserve a salary (and eating, housing ...). I guess many other fundings use that....
So what I would want to know if I were you is how much rent you pay per hour of work you do in the office. I understand you wouldn't want to share that with us, but it might make you consider the studio's worth to you.
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I used to do this when a micro manager challenged how I was doing my job. I used an app on my phone and built up the categories as I went. It took about a week to get used to it but once the habit was there it easy to maintain. Since a lot of my job was management and dealing with staff issues it meant that the "ephemeral talking time tasks" could be accounted for. The app let me extract reports as pdf. So the next time I was second guessed I had the data to support my position.
Maybe it could be interesting to compare your calendar blocking and time tracking tables? So e.g how many hours were you planning to spend on a task, and how many did you actually spend doing that thing ^^
Seconding! That's what I was most curious with this.
+
definitely need a video on that! :D
I’m a teacher in a secondary school and really want to time track as a mini project about teacher workload. Been wanting to do it for ages and this has given me the motivation to track what I do as a teacher in real time over the next autumn term!
That sounds so interesting!
As a legal aid lawyer, we have to time record each unit of 6 minutes, with the idea of 6 hours of chargeable work a day. We round up so technically even your three min tasks are counted!
It is a complete nightmare without a system that can time stuff for you but luckily ours is quite good. We then have targets per month, which can be a bit grim.
Sometimes it feels like its helping productivity and sometimes it feels like a right faff and the pressure takes away from what actually is important in the work. It also worries me about how we will ever get to move to the four day week and it does warp your brain a bit in terms of what you value. I am really good at my 6 times table now though!😂
Honestly the most fun thing about this video is discovering that there is such a thing as too much data for Hannah Witton! I use time tracking all the time as a freelancer, and because I get paid different hourly rates at my day job depending on what work I do. I’d be curious to track things like leisure, self care, or exercise for myself.
So, I've been using toggl for work since I finished Uni, for a few years now.
Looking back, I even did a time-tracking / diary thing at Uni in the months I spend on my bachelor's and master's thesis. I just needed to write down, what I did that day in a few words, because a day or a week later I would have had no clue what I did, so it's a nice habit. Also I just wrote down my start and endtime during the day to get an idea how much I am working.
I struggle with my sense of time and my focus (I suspect I have ADHD), so I really depend on those tools, when I don't have an outside structure, like classes. I can't plan ahead because of that lack of sense of time, so I really enjoy seeing hard numbers looking back. I totally understand that you hated it because its really nitty-gritty and unnecessary, when you alredy do well with calender blocking.
At work it helps me a ton to write down what I am about to do as a task and then start the toggl task timer because this way, when I get distracted by noise or my own thoughts I can look to the right on my toogl screen and see what I was doing. It also helps me to realise, when I should take break, that's usually the case, when I start skipping between tasks and have to start the toggl task clock anew several times in the span of 10minutes. Then its time to take a nap or go for a walk or eat lunch.
I am also obligated to report how much time I spend on which customer project for the bills, thats why toggl's project function comes in handy. All in all, I am a big fan.
I also have ADHD, and I now want to try to use it to see how long I spend on things in the week. I'm often not aware of time passing, so I don't know if meal prep tonight took me 30 minutes or 2h, and it's quite annoying when I want to plan things. I tried to use calendar blocking when I had an office job, and I wasn't really successful at it, but it was nice to be able to go back to my calendar when I was losing focus and be reminded of what I was supposed to do. Or just move the thing to later and do the task I actually wanted to do. But i used it to time track as well, like I would plan out the day and go back to my calendar when I was switching tasks and adjust how long the task had actually taken me. And sometimes i was really surprised.
I've read that Toggl has a Pomodoro timer function, which (the Pomodoro method) I have found soooo useful when working an office job. Honestly, people were taking no breaks at all, just working 7 or 8 hours a day, Monday to Friday, with no breaks. Taking regular breaks (honestly, I was just going to the toilet and scrolling on my phone for a minute or two) helped me so much and made me so much more efficient and happy about my job. I'd recommend it if you haven't tried it yet!
Honestly, just understanding how my ADHD brain works has done wonders to my productivity and happiness when at work, because I can just find solutions for my problems. It helps with knowing where to look. So good for you for finding a tool that helps!
136 hours over 5.75 weeks (remember the bank holiday!) is over 23 1/2 hours per week. You're almost perfectly efficient!
Oh damn 💁🏼♀️💁🏼♀️💁🏼♀️
I keep thinking I need to do this at work because sometimes I end up wondering what I did in a day, perfectly timed video :)
Since I went back to work from maternity leave, my partner has been tracking how many mornings, evenings and weekend days we each spend looking after or being the ‘lead parent’ with our son. I do an office job full-time but my partner is a freelancer who works a lot of evenings and weekends. This is her way of trying to ensure the childcare is split as evenly as possible between us and that she does as close to her fair share as she can. At the moment it’s just tracking 0.25s of a day in an excel spreadsheet, so not a perfect system but it’s been really interesting to see the actual data of how our hours stack up and not just how it might feel after a particularly tiring week.
I used to be a consultant, so I did time tracking for about 10 years … before there were good apps for it 😅
I made myself an excel spreadsheet that I could put the times, project #, & task notes in and it would automatically calculate times & fill in a bunch of charts to make billing easier. I often worked odd hours, so it was especially helpful for knowing when I was reaching the weekly project limits & knowing how much time was spent on individual bugs/change orders.
I was often in the unique situation on our teams of billing to multiple projects at once … most people had 1-2, but I often had more than 5 because I specialized in security & it touches every aspect of a program. It made it really important to differentiate between my time.
I could imagine that time tracking would be really interesting in a more company based environment. Like I have a lot of different projects/functions at my workplace and it would be interesting how many hours I pour into each of my functions.
I think I've been doing a calendar blocking/time tracking combo. Like I have my consistent daily things and then events or appointments that I can schedule. And then a couple times a day, I'll check my calendar and update the times based on what I did and how long I actually did them. If I let myself get so granular that I'm trying to track every minute of my day, I would literally never get anything done because I would be so focused on the clock.
That said, I do use a color code system to denote the importance of each thing rather than sphere of life (so work and doctors are one color because I cannot miss them, my routines are another color because I have more freedom of when I do them, and then things I want to do are another color so they stand out but don't guilt me if my feelings change). It makes things really easy for me to review without getting hung up on the specifics, as much as I might appreciate seeing the data.
I would love to see this as compared to when you worked 40(ish) hours a week - do you reckon everything directly scaled up (i.e., if you spend 30% of your time on brand deals now, was it also 30% when you worked 40 hours a week) or do you think when you were working more hours there were different things that took your time?
Had to pause the video and comment when you said you were filming with Cinema Therapy?! So excited to see this collab! ❤
This is so cool and inspirational. It makes what many would consider a dream job more real and realistic.
So interesting. I don't use such granular categories, but my therapist recommended time tracking to me for my whole day and to capture how much I'm sleeping and I've been doing it for like 3 years now in a basic excel spreadsheet. And for me, I find time blocking more stressful because I don't like facing how often I change my plans.
This! I have tried to calendar block, and while it can come in handy on occasion (when I need to protect my time from folks who will just schedule willy-nilly), I have such a hard time using it for task management. I think I'm going to try Toggl, but honestly your spreadsheet idea sounds just as good.
The book "168 hours: what successful women do before breakfast" is a great read, where she ends up deculpabilizing women & helping us recenter our priorities. A nice read!
I had to track my time at a job once where I was doing bits and bobs for a whole bunch of different projects, so I had about 40 different tags for the different tasks I did. Tracking it was horrible, but one of the admin tags included time spent time tracking, and I always got a little kick out of using that one :-)
SO interesting to hear about your work time distribution! ❤ And yeah I see that it’s exhausting to be tracking everything. Tried that once myself, didn’t even last two days. Kudos to you for making it through all those weeks!
Hey Hannah! You should look up Laura Vanderkam's 168 hours for 'whole of life' time tracking. She recommends a less detailed approach where you make a note across half hour increments, rather than minute to minute. She also suggests just taking time every few hours to go back and fill in the time log, so you're not disrupting the flow of your day doing it. V interesting!
Second this book - and "I know how she does it" which is another book by her. I loved it so much I interviewed her on my podcast!
I used to have to do this for some projects and I absolutely hated it. So good on you for trying it. Oh side note that outfit is super cute, really knocking it out of the park.
now we need that calendar blocking update
I kinda track my time and do calendar blocking at the same time? I calendar block planning my time, then during the day i keep fixing it to look like what i was actually doing with my time.... But its reaaaly chill and not too specific and accurate lol
I work in customer service and recently started doing time tracking at work (I was selected to trial it for the team). It's been pretty challenging because a large part of my role is answering the phone and then doing a variety of admin tasks in between calls so I have to keep stopping and starting the timer again when a call comes in. However, it has been so helpful in providing evidence to managers on how much time we're spending on different areas of work & hopefully will demonstrate that we could do with an additional member in our team! 🤞🏻
I would love to see a video on how you typically organise all your different projects and day-to-day/regular schedule. As someone who also loves to have a plan, seeing how you do it would be very cool!
Time tracking seems like something that someone like me (really into planning and data collection) would love, but in reality it is NOT for me. My course of studies (translation) implies doing lots of different projects/activities, which is so bothersome to track. I only use it to track at the beginning of the year how long it takes me to read some longer material (novels, plays, etc.) to know how much time to allocate for that in my planner
Any stats Hannah video is fun. And how much you enjoy the discovery too 😂
At the beginning of the video I thought it'd be a good idea to do the same, but when I finished watching I was just thinking I'd never manage (besides sounding boring af). I have ADHD and stopping to track everything I do wouldn't be productive because the potential for distractions increases tenfold. I started calendar blocking because of your video and that is enough for me, really.
As for how I thought your time would look like l imagined you'd spend more time on admin than you actually do. I was under the impression you did soooo much admin 😂
As someone who for 7 years had to track their time as an auditor (billing to customers) I will never go back. It was so bad for my mental health travking every minute i was working (I had an app that ran like a clock on my desktop and could see exactly how much i worked). I felt guilty if I hadn't worked enough hours and guilty if i worked longer as it was less time with my family/for me. I now have a job where that isn't the case and it feels so liberating as travking time made me feel like efficiency wasn't rewarded as you had to find something else to do.
Time tracking is one of the reasons why I hated working as a project manager. I was managing between 30 and 50 smaller projects at the time and had to track every phone call and email, which I often forgot when I was in the flow and at the end of the day spent like 30 mins trying to remember on which projects I spent how much time.
Ugh that sounds so frustrating!!
So a while back I was also curious about where my time was going and how much I was pouring into each of the categories that make up my life, and the app Boosted worked great for me!
Instead of inputting each task separately and tagging it, you just press play on either one of the projects you've set up (e.g. work, errands, relax) or a recurring subtask within it (for example, under "body maintenance" I had morning/night routines and also, yes, showering, but in my defense I was depressed and basic tasks were an accomplishment 😅). The start/stop tracking mechanism makes it much easier to catalog those tiny 3min tasks, although like you I think I still got tired of tracking things so extensively after a while. (But that's on me, and then I switched to a less-precise tracking system on paper, which I kept up with for yeeears and only stopped because life got incredibly hectic very suddenly. I should really start it up again, though, it was incredibly useful.)
You can also input things after the fact, so if you just do really broad categories and intentionally imprecise time units (e.g. "work = 8 hours, walk = 40 min, Rowan/Dan time = 3h (of which pure Dan time is like 30min), you could accumulate really useful data by just logging things once or twice a day. If I recall, the analytics tool was also fairly robust, so hopefully you wouldn't have to do the pie charts yourself.
Great video as always, love this channel!
I’m a teacher and we don’t really have contract hours (well we do but it’s not being tracked so EVERYONE works over time unpaid most days). I decided to track it for me and I wish I had stayed oblivious 😂
This is really fascinating stuff, I watched the whole video in one go!
As an accountant who has to fill in super granular timesheets every day I feel your pain! I always end up sticking at least half an hour down to miscellaneous "admin" because otherwise it's so hard to keep track of all the little 2 minute tasks in between bigger jobs.
Current work activity: watching Hannah's video while half heartedly reading emails. 👀
This is a bit of a random comment, but watching you talk about the time spent researching for Hannah Witton and Friends reminded me of the general dilemma you've expressed around 'refilling the well'. I don't know if this has been suggested before, but I would find a video of you reading one of your sex books and then talking about it really interesting :D So the research time could be spent just reading, and then the video could be like a mini reading vlog, your thoughts on what the experience felt like, and what you thought of the book :)
Sorry this is a bit random hahah, the thought just popped into my mind and I wanted to share - and also to say that I love your content and have been a viewer for many years now
Zooming out can be easy with calendar blocking, at least I use calendar blocking for both work/studies and leisure. Then you'd only need to calculate average outside/travel and remember when you were outside taking a walk, where your diary keeping comes in 😊
I have to do time tracking at work for projects/billing clients, and it is exhausting, I end up doing 15min increments, and I'm not accurate about time spent on a client if I'm responding to multiple emails from multiple clients in bulk!
I found it easier to track in writing by creating my to do list for the day, then writing next to each task how long I spent on that task. At the end of week, i logged my time online by referencing my notes.
I found that writing was less disruptive than tracking directly online as it meant I don't need to open a browser/switch tabs on my computer when i finished a task.
I time track for billable hours, which is much easier than this. I don't change tasks frequently. I'm usually working on 1 project for multiple days at a time. I also use the pomodoro method, so most of my time is tracked in 30 minute chunks
So fun!
Love the data, but the actual tracking is a pain!
we (have to) use a time-tracking tool at work (for the bosses to know how much to bill our clients bsically), and some people find it really stressfull and they struggle at the end of each month to filll theirs out, but I love it
but we do have a 15-minte rule = a task ist only worth recording, if it takes the majority of a 15-min time-bracket... (if you do a lot of smaller stuff you'll record it in 1 entry "bit and bobs" or smth) --> that way you dont use half of your time tracking
Listening to you talk about your emails made me check mine. LOL
I totally understand how frustrating it is to input every single little thing, but it was still a good experiment. In terms of travel, I am sorry you didn't track your commute - home to studio including the stops each way at the child-minder. I've found that in my working life, the commutes are often what ruined things for me, either in the time they too or just the realities of travel - unless, those rare times I was able to walk, which was relaxing and helpful, unlike driving or taking public transport. Commuting is a huge time and energy gobbler.
I'm an hourly contractor, so I do time track... but I'm not stop/ starting it every time I get up to go to the bathroom or make a snack, because if I was salaried I would be getting paid for those moments also... And if it's a quick task that took me 5 minutes or less and I didn't start the timer, I usually just go in and log 5 minutes on Admin or whatever. I bill in 15 minute increments so all those 5 minutes add up.
You did a thing with CinemaTherapy?? Looking forward to that! Think I even suggested that collab once in some comment section! :D
I'd be curious to know how much time I spend on things (but maybe not knowing is better) but I just can't imagine doing this. I don't know if I have ADHD or not but staying on task is damn near impossible for me and I keep skipping from one thing to the next or trying to do multiple things at once.
And at my actual work, even if I want to focus on one thing, I have to keep switching to doing different things because of the people around me. Which is often frustrating and makes things take longer.
We had to do I think a week of time tracking everything in our lives for a high school econ homework. This was done old school in an excel sheet (in the 2000s) :D I did find it interesting :) I enjoy time tracking although it has gotten harder since my kiddo's here. (1 now)
I loosely time track for my job with CT. They never check on it ( because I’m salary) but it’s more for me to see what I spend my time on and make sure I hit my weekly hours goal. I’d hate getting too granular, so I lump little things together. I use Notion which makes it more fun because I love Notion.
love Notion but how do you use it as a timetracker?!
@@morehannah I use a table with columns for tasks and time spent, and it automatically converts to minutes/hours and adds up my time. I generate a new table from my template weekly and archive the old ones.
I’m in the same boat as you where I’m supposed to time track for work but I hate it. I never remember to do it, it takes too much time, and it’s so subjective it makes it feel meaningless. Agree with everything you said lol
I was working remotely for a German company which was using a time tracking up for all remote employees. I could never make it to be honest and I was doing great with my job post. Productivity is usually messed with hours of working but it is not the same!
Thanks
Proof that a content creator isn’t all fun and games 😊
I have to timetrack for work because I work on a lot of projects for a lot of different clients that all need invoicing, so I'm very used to it at work.
I'd be torn about tracking the rest of my life. On one hand, I have ADHD and so have a poor sense of natural time tracking. I think I would do it temporarily to then evaluate my goals (e.g. spend more time outside)
As a paralegal I am *required* by my job to track all of my time, down to the tenth of an hour (every 6 minutes)- essentially recording the time that I spend working on each particular case each day. It's stressful to get used to-I'm often working on 7-12 cases in a typical day- but there are proprietary softwares for it in the legal industry in the U.S. (Lawyers also must track their time.) I can't imagine doing this voluntarily 😅
Time tracking seems cumbersome if it has to be done manually. Depending on how one feels about AI, cyber security and robot uprisings I could imagine new smart trackers could help, which can automatically analyse this and maybe only ask about a few things at the end of the day to confirm/review.
I'm fascinated with medical and social technology, like smart toilets, but also recognise that they could be manipulated by individuals or movements.
I am a data nerd, if you can give me some data to look at I will be happy, so a leisure time split recording, or a time tracking app comparison video would be very interesting to me!!
oh the tag on time spent tracking the time. I stopped doing this after seeing that but it's interesting to analyse a month a year or so to improve
Poor you for feeling like you had to stick to it for 6 whole weeks 😅 All for the entertainment 😂 I would have been interested in how long you spent on feedback, since you don't do the edits yourself, would be interesting to see how much of your time it still requires.
This would absolutely not be for me, already depressed about how many hours I spend working- wouldn't want to see it written down 🤣.
A side question! If we skip over the 'ad' part of a sponsored video do you lose out?
yeah i was like why did u do this for 6 wks if u hated it haha but it makes sense that u would want more data bc then it might reflect more accurately than like a week or two possibly? haha love the pie charts tho!
I time track any partner work as they have pre-paid support hours and must pay for any overages. Because it can result in payment, we use a browser extension that we can turn on and off. Each partner has a project for each product they use, so i can mark that i supported X partner on Y platform for Z amount of time. It IS tedious, but the worst is when i get into a project and realize halfway through i havent been timing it, so i have to guesstimate when i started. Thankfully usually thats pretty easy to get right (based on end of last meeting or end of last tracked item). I could not imagine trying to do it for my everyday life though. Absolutely not.
I time track (loosely) because I'm paid hourly and over time is NOT paid (I'm a civil servant). So I want to prove my manager that if I come one hour late it's because I overworked one hour the day before. Also I do three main task and I need to know how much time I spend on each task.
I tried Rize for a bit and only stopped because its quite pricey. It worked well and eased my anxiety that i wasnt doing enough work time, it actually taught me i domt procrastinate as much as i did. Recommend even for a trial period, super low maintenance!
18:08 which snooze button do you mean? Something from your email program?
Maybe? I use gmail and it’s a feature where you can “snooze” the email to a different date/time so it disappears from your inbox until then!
How did you decide on Toggl over other apps or even an excel spreadsheet?
Time tracking is pretty much *never* for the workers or have to do it; it's always for either management "evaluation" or for client (or vendor) billing or for task-specific tax write-offs...
Did trackib your time influence how you spent your time while you were at it? I tracked my time reading for a month and the trackib made me read for longer chunks as I became aware I would be at it for 5mins, grab my phone for 3mins, then go back to book.
Great Great Mom-Mom!♥️♥️♥️♥️
So interesting how you spread allocated 24h of work across 4 days. I work 24h a week but for me these are 3 days of work. I wonder if you'd be able to do it in 3 days or if that would be too stressful. 🤔
Would be impossible as my work day is 9:30am-4:30pm so if I worked every minute of that with no breaks for 3 days it’d be max 21 hours!
What about tracking how much email is for different projects? You could use similar categories to Toggl and also compare received and sent…maybe that would be too short a video?
💖
Not to the same scale but European NGO fundings ask for this beautiful thing called time sheets. A ridiculous report on how you used your time DAILY on a project. In order to justify you deserve a salary (and eating, housing ...).
I guess many other fundings use that....
I should probably do this because I'm a solicitor and billable hours. However I'm an in house solicitor so that's why I dont need to do it 😂
So what I would want to know if I were you is how much rent you pay per hour of work you do in the office. I understand you wouldn't want to share that with us, but it might make you consider the studio's worth to you.
Also, I work as a consultant, so I'm one of those people having to account for every hour of work. It does help you be more conscious of your time.
I have spent the vast majority of my career (7 years so far) tracking my time. I abhor it. That is all.
I think one reason you DIDN'T like it was that the validity of the data was not as good as you would have wanted
I really thought there would be more time spent on emails)
hi