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Following on Laura Thomas’s question about #productivity software tools, I’d like to share an experiment I did some time ago to, amongst other reasons, increase my performance, in case someone finds it interesting.
My hypothesis was that, although I thought I was making a good use of my time overall, by understanding how was I exactly allocating it I’d be able to identify a number of adjustments I could perform to make myself more efficient and aligned with my goals.
What I did:
– Wrote down the buckets in which I was investing my time (research, network, sales, producing deliverables, family, friends, cultural activities, reading, sleeping, etc). Wrote down, for each bucket, 1) what percentage of time I’d like to invest, and 2) what percentage of time I thought I was already investing.
– Over period of a couple weeks I used Toggle to track EVERYTHING I was doing. Using, both, the desktop and the mobile app to make it easier.
– Then, I analysed my results, and found the differences between how I thought I was investing my time, how I was actually investing it, and how I would like to invest it.
When analysing the results, I realised that I was investing way more time than I expected in certain areas that were trivial to me, and way less in others that were actually important to me, despite my perception telling me otherwise – which was surprising and to some extent disappointing. However, by doing this experiment I gained the insights I needed to make meaningful changes to better use my time.
3 Comments-
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Good question, an interesting one is that I was over-investing in commute and under-investing in sports, so one of the changes I made was to expand the radious of my cycling area; reducing my commute investment in the same amount it increased my investment in sports.
Another surpsing one was shopping, which consumed just 0.04% of my time. This was due to a combination of reasons: me buying exclusively online, having a polished shopping cart saved and, probably, that for some reason I didn’t feel the need to buy anything meaningful during that time; otherwise, the kind of market research I perform before buying something I care about would have increased the number exponentially.
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This sounds like a great experiment! The one I got back to again and again is the 80:20 principle – it’s a book that a previous manager gave to me, and although I can go off target, it is a good way to reassess!
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Understand if it’s private, but I would love to know where the over and under-investing was occurring!! I might have to try this myself. Maybe we could run it as a TPC community challenge one week!