If you feel like you never have time, you NEED to perform this ONE task

“Where did my day go?” is the most common question you ask yourself.

I’ve been thinking about what I could do to not ask that question every day so here’s what we’ll try to solve for you:

“Where did my day go?”

The solution to this is easy but you need to put in the effort (after I tell you how).

If you’re trying to lose weight, you track what you eat.

If you’re training for a marathon, you track your distance, duration, sleep and nutrition.

To understand where your time goes, you track ‘where your time goes’

Perform a ‘Time Audit’

We underestimate the time we spend enjoying and overestimate the time we spend working. That’s okay because it’s how we’re wired.

We can however unlearn this by calling out our crap.

One way to do this is audit your time - you track time spent for a few days (3 is a good start).

How?

Easy. Write down:

• What tasks you do during the day

• The time spent on each task and when you did it

• Look back at the end of the day and expect a rough 22 hours tracked (I’ll leave the accuracy buffer to you)

You don’t need anything fancy. A simple notepad will do.

What to expect?

Your time will broadly fit 3 categories:

1. Productive tasks: Office, Gym, Reading

2. Mindless Activities: Social media, Binge watching

3. Leisure: Talking to a friend, meeting colleagues at the water cooler

4. (Unexpected events because life 🤷‍♂️)

After 3 days (At least) of tracking you will know:

• Where your time goes

• Your most productive hours

• How much you slack off

The information from this exercise will help you answer “where you time goes” but more importantly, how to estimate your days.

I did this myself to understand why I wasn’t able to do 97 things in a day. I realised it’s not possible to do every. single. thing. under the sun.

Promise me this:

Don’t be hard on yourself based on the outcome of this experiment. Do this to be more mindful of your time.

• Mindful work

• Mindful leisure

• Mindful socialising

We’re not robots. We don’t need to live like them.

However, we can leverage a few tools to be less anxious and more kind to ourselves.

So try it out and let me know how it goes. As always, you can reply to this e-mail (I always reply).

Hope you found this helpful

Until next time

Cheers
Rainar