Time Tracking List

 In this article, you’ll learn:

• Benefits of using a time tracking system

• How to create a time tracking list

• How to use your time tracking list to generate insights

What is a Time Tracking list and why do I need one?

The demands for your attention are rising every day and there seems to be an endless list of work to get done at home, in the office, and for personal projects. Without knowing where you spend your time, it is difficult to control your schedule or find ways to make the most of your precious time. And since time is a finite resource that you can never buy back, it’s never too early to take control of how you spend it. You can become more efficient and make more time for the things you love by using a time tracking system. The potential benefits of time tracker include:

• Identify and cut out time wasters

  • By understanding where your time goes, you can adjust course and remove or reduce areas where you are wasting time today. This can help you reallocate that time to more important work and other areas of your life that matter more.

• Prioritize the right areas or projects

  • You can keep yourself focused on your most important work and confirm that you are committing the right amount of time to each area. By having accountability for where you spend time, you can make changes necessary to refocus the right way.

• Reduce time spent in meetings

  • Once you understand how much time of your day is spent in meetings, you’ll be able to make changes to reduce the number of meetings and have an accurate way to see the trend move down over time. 

• Schedule focus time for your most important work

  • Using a time tracker, you can get an accurate sense of your bandwidth for the day so you can work to reorganize your schedule leaving more focus time for the most important items.

• Drive meaningful performance and prioritization conversations with your boss, partner or team 

  • By having an accurate record of where you’ve spent your time, you can bring data into your conversations with your manager and team about where you are driving impact, when you need to re-prioritize or reallocate your time, and when you need more resources to get the job done. 

If any of these benefits resonate with you, consider creating a time tracking system of your own to take back your time.  

Creating your time tracker.

Below are the basic steps to create your own system, and you can use our template here to get started or take our time tracking course to learn how to do this step-by-step.

To create and use your time tracker:

1. Define your goal for time tracking

2. Identify and centralize work inputs and categories

3. Set up a tracker in a tool of your choice

4. Build a routine and habit for tracking

5. Analyze your results to drive meaningful insights

Define your goal

You read about the potential benefits of using a time tracker above, and it's imperative to define exactly what your goal is in creating your time tracking system. Setting up and using a time tracker does require an upfront investment of time and a small time commitment every day. If you don’t have a clear reason to track your time, it will be hard to stay motivated to use your tracker and it can become a waste of time itself.

So, the first step to developing your successful time tracking system is to define your goal. Why do you want to track your time? Be clear about what you are hoping to accomplish, and use this to create a custom tool for your needs.

Outline inputs and categories

Once you have a goal in mind, you are ready to start building a custom tool for your needs. Next, you’ll need to define the inputs for your time tracker and the categories and information you need to include in your tracker to drive meaningful insights. 

To do this, write a list of all of the ways you get requests or items of work. This could include email, project management tools, calendar requests, request forms, pings from your manager, specialized tools for your role and more. 

Next, write down the details you’ll need to capture to drive insights and accomplish your goal, such as categories/type of work, source of requests, team/department, or related projects. The more structured context you can capture about your work, the more insights you’ll be able to develop. 

Now you’re ready to build your tracker in your tool of choice, and you’ll use this list of inputs and details as the foundation for your system.

Set up a tracker

To build a useful tracker, you need to create it in a tool that is accessible, structured, and easy for you to use. For first time trackers, I recommend tracking in your task management tool of choice or in a simple spreadsheet tool such as Google Sheets or Excel. 

You can also use a specialized time tracking tool such as Harvest, Hourstack, or Toggl, and these are great solutions for people who need a very precise time tracking option for billing clients and generating invoices. These types of tools often have a cost associated with their use. You can see more detail in our template or our course about setting up your tracker in various tools if you need help selecting a tool.

Once you’ve selected a tool, you need to build the structure for your time tracker (unless you are using a time tracking-specific app). To do this, you’ll create columns or fields for all of the details you need and you’ll decide how you will get your inputs into the tracker on a regular basis.

To structure the details, create a column or field for each category you outlined in the previous step. If your tool allows, create a predefined list of options for anything that can be categorized such as type of work, request source, etc. This will make your data capture consistent to improve the quality of insights you can generate.  Then, add a column for Date to capture the day you are tracking and “Time spent” where you will input the amount of time you spend on each item.

Then, review your list of inputs and look into whether you can automate the capture of items from any of your input sources into your tracking tool. You can do this through tools like Zapier or through native integrations within your tool. For anything that can’t be automatically generated, you will need to enter these manually, and you should create a process for you to review each input source daily and enter items into your tracking list. For buckets of items you will do daily, set up a recurring item that can regenerate each day if your tool allows you to do this.

Build a routine and habit of tracking

Once the structure of your habit tracker is created, you are ready to start using it by populating the items you want to track. You will need to do this every day, and I recommend creating a morning or evening routine to generate this list at the start of your day or at the end of your day looking ahead to the next day. When you are generating your list of items, you’ll add a new row or item for each thing you need to do and fill in the structured details such as category, team, etc. 

Then, when you work on the item, you will track how long you spend on it and fill in the “Time spent” field. I recommend measuring in 15 minute increments and tracking in hours, using 0.25 for each 15 minutes (i.e. 0.5 = 30 minutes, 1.0 = 1 hour, etc.). If you are new to tracking your time, I would recommend using a timer app (there are several free options available online) to start and stop the timer when you begin and finish working on each item. This will give you a much more accurate measure of your time. Once you get better at measuring this on your own, you can stop using the timer and do this free hand by keeping an eye on the clock instead. 

For items that take less than 15 minutes, consider grouping similar items into buckets so you can avoid context switching and track more holistically. For example, instead of tracking time spent responding to each client email, I could create a “Client email” bucket, respond to all my client emails in one block of time and track the time spent on all of them. 

Analyze your results

Once you have been tracking your time for a week or two, you can start generating insights by analyzing the data you’ve captured. You can do this using reporting in the tool you chose, or by exporting the data and analyzing in a spreadsheet tool like Google Sheets using pivot tables, charts, and graphs. 

A few reports I recommend creating for your time tracker include:

• Time spent by category

• Time spent by day

• Time spent by day of week

• Average daily time in meetings

You can see how to set up these types of reports in our time tracking course and there are some examples included in our time tracking template.

Once you start to see the types of insights you can generate from analyzing the data you’ve tracked, hopefully you will be able to accomplish your initial goal and also get other insights that can inform your work and help you optimize how and where you spend your time.