Doing Time – STP044

Episode 44 - Can you rely on time? Can you manage it? What were you doing with yours 3 days ago at 3:15 pm? Wanna find out? Then have a listen! Some of the USEFUL stuff in there is: Time management doesn't work What does 'time' even mean? Could we change how we measure time - some people already have Time seems to stretch depending on what you are doing Psychology Today explains why the years pass faster as you get older Terry - come one, give him a chance! At least his facts are real The earth doesn't revolve every 24 hours The French tried to 'decimalise' time - TWICE! In the Soviet Union, they changed the length of the week 3 times in the 20th Century Changing your approach to what fills your day could work two ways: Getting more done in the same time Doing the same amount in less time Which one do you want? They're both good for different reasons Lunchtime - how do you do yours? Why measuring 'performance' just based on how many hours someone works may not be useful Is it time to find out what fills your 168 hours? E-mails take up more than we think, according to - Forbes.com That's just e-mails; where are your other 'time-thieves'? Track your time - it's VERY revealing The Art of Manliness wrote - this article on the subject You can do it in different ways - one way is with apps Here's one The one we used was - Toggl Consider how you're going to track your time with an app; there are 2 key ways: Every time you start a new task, log it Checking in each 15/30 minutes and logging what you've been doing The great thing about Toggl is that you can select categories and tags My categories were: Work-reactive actions (meetings, resolving stuff etc) Work - proactive actions (planning, developing, strategy) Routines Travel Calls Self-development Eating Family time Relaxing Meditating Messing about Podcast production Instead of apps, try tracking time using a paper-based method Decide on doing weekday/weekend or both Log actions every 15/30 minutes (you decide) Write EVERYTHING down - including messing about time (e.g. social media scrolling) Be honest Suspend judgement until you've finished Do it for at least 1 week - 2 if you can If you want to - log it on paper first (the raw activities) and then put into Toggl afterwards You can then categorise, and Toggl gives you reports in different ways Take what you've learned and use it to inform what steps you want to take Go and look at any of our other episodes to work on what you've decided on A good place to start if you want to plan your day better is Episode 35 We discovered that Terry needs some equipment training!