I love Sundays. My inbox isn’t as busy. People don’t phone as much. There’s isn’t as much news to read through. It’s a perfect day to review the week that was, plan the upcoming week and do some general organizing.
(btw we’ll get to the psychic part at the bottom of the article)
Recently I created a time sheet system that got me excited. Time tracking + exciting? I know it sounds like a reach, but hear me out.
There’s no better way to really get an idea of how the week was and plan the following week, unless you have an accurate idea of how much you can deal with. And that has been a problem of mine in the past and I think I’m not alone…you see most people overestimate what they can get done. It’s one of the problem areas in time management I like to address. I think it’s critical to establish an accurate feedback system that signals us if we are overworking or overcommitting.
We do already have such a feedback system built in. They are your body signalling the state of your energy levels (mental, physical, spiritual, emotional). For example, if you’re tired, mentally weary, feel apathic, disconnected, your energy levels are telling you something is out of balance. But many of us – thanks in parter to a ‘hard-worker’ mentality – have learnt to override these signals.
While I created a system that acts as a fine-tuned feedback system (like having your own life coach), there is an old school way of getting an audit of your time and activities. It’s something peak performance and time management coaches often use as a tool with their clients: time sheets.
By recording in detail how you spend your time for a day, a few days or a week, you can acquire an accurate report on where you are with your time management. Regular time sheets typically consist of you writing or typing what you’re doing and logging the time along with it.
I wondered if I couldn’t get in a great more detail, so I could have students of my upcoming course track their progress in richer ways. I wanted to give people a way to assess how they were doing with their progress. So I asked myself what are the hall marks of a quality activity?
I came up with a short list of ‘yes/no’ answers and adopted them into a specially designed time sheet as checkbox columns. I’m going to devote separate posts to each of these questions, but if you want to download the time sheets and/or see what the questions are, go to the dedicated page for the ‘Advanced Time & Activity Audit Sheet‘ (it’s a free download).
What I’ve found though, that these questions give an incredibly accurate diagnosis of how one is managing time and how to improve it. The information it gives is priceless.
A Psychic Experiment
If you are planning out your week today, why not see how accurate you are in predicting your own productivity. Write down what you think you will have done 7 days from now. You don’t need to write them down as a to-list. Just write down what you think you will have done. What kind of results will you have created? What projects will you have tended to?
Then at the end of the week, write down what you actually got done and run a comparison. Are you overestimating your weekly goals? Are you getting side tracked? Are there areas that you are avoiding? Also note what you got done, but didn’t plan for. Why didn’t you plan that?
If you are daring enough, track your time with the time sheet provided here – and you’ll get an in depth look in to your own day-to-day experience in a new way.
Would love to hear your thoughts, especially if you are trying out this experiment yourself.