whatbrentsay

It can be difficult to feel in control of the time we have. We spend it regularly but if I asked you to think back six weeks could you remember how you spent that week overall? Was it mostly work? For yourself? For others?

How would you know whether or not you have time to do something you want or need to if you can't easily assess what's taking up your time? This is something I've been trying to get better at. It started in the distant pre-Covid era but considering how much less control many of us feel like we have these days, it feels like an even more valuable habit to practice.

What do I mean by logging time? Simply, I mean using a calendar as an ongoing reference for where your time is being spent. There are specialized apps that are designed to do this but I recommend keeping it simple and using whatever calendar app you're most familiar with. You can always export your calendar as a CSV—a very portable file type—and take that data with you if you so choose. All you need is to be able to create events and set their start and end times.

This is what a calendar week may look like for me when I'm on top of my logging (hint: not recently):

I've got some simple color coding going on: gray is work work, yellow are general life-related necessities, green is productive time. Purple's my calendar's default color (surprise) and ends up being a catch all most of the time. The big empty areas are either time I've spent recreationally or sleeping. For a well logged week I can glace at it and quickly get a sense of how productive I was, how much time I spent watching YouTube videos, and how much time I had to spend on tasks to keep my life/health in reasonable standing.

My system is optimized to help me spot my productive time but that may not matter to you; you don't have to have a system like mine. What do you wish you could spend more of your time on? Family? Reading? Self improvement? You could color-code or use event titles to more easily identify how much time you're spending on those things now. Over time the gaps around them will reveal where you could be spending more of your time. If you want to go further, you could log your down time, your sleep, and write notes within the events as a reminder of exactly what it is that you did. I don't do all that but I won't deny how useful that additional context could be.

I know some folks will see the example above and think "that's a lot of work." It takes some dedication, yes. Ideally, you build the habit of adding events as you're doing things so you can get the start and end times right but that's not always practical. For me, I use part of that "Evening review" time you see at the end of my day to fill in my day. I guarantee it won't take you more than 5 minutes to do if you don't get distracted.

Why do all that? Allow me the be cliche: knowledge is power. Where you spend your time will grant you additional self-awareness, which is objectively a good thing. Time is the most valuable currency we have and you can't spend it wisely if you don't know how much of it you can spend. Once your time budget is clear, you can take the next step and confidently plan in advance—truly taking control of the time you do have. In the same way you wouldn't like your money being spent without your explicit input, you shouldn't be too comfortable with the idea of your time being spent without your awareness of how.

Logging your time gives you the foundation you need to start planning your time. Planning your time allows you to finally check off some of the items I know you have on an unreasonably long to-do list. Getting things done feels good; it's free endorphins. But that's for later. For now, give logging a try. Start small, maybe just a week. How will it make you feel when you know exactly how and where you spent your time?