PERSONAL / TIME MANAGEMENT SPECIAL............ 5 Things Learnt From Tracking My Time for a Month

5 Things Learnt From Tracking My Time for a Month

Are you really getting all you can from a day's work?
Probably not. Here's how to find out for sure.

Here are some questions everyone should ask:

1. What am I doing too much of?

I was displeased, though not really surprised, to see that I can spend as much as seven hours a week on email. Admittedly, email is how I communicate with customers.. It's also true that checking my inbox often keeps me from harming the productivity of ASJA staff and colleagues who would otherwise have to wait for my answers to their questions. Still, I suspect that cutting my email time to half an hour or at most an hour a day would help me by freeing that time for other things. I'm going to give it a try.

2. What's taking longer than I thought?

I was surprised to see how much time I was devoting to a single not-very-high-paying customer. When I compared that time to the month's revenues from that customer, it wasn't a pretty picture. On the other hand, I know this client has the potential to help bring in more lucrative work, and that the more time I put in, the likelier that is to happen. I'm going to keep a close eye on how much time I spend on those projects, and keep looking for ways to make that work more efficient.

3. What could I hand off?

Do I really need to be the one doing each of these tasks? The answer for me is no, and I bet it's the same for you. Back to email for a moment: I spend a portion of my email time answering pitches from PR people who want me to write about their clients (usually for this column). When I answer them, it's most often to explain what kind of topics I write about or ask for specifics about what they're pitching. I plan to cut down on the email time suck by asking my research assistant to send these follow-ups instead of me.

4. What has the biggest impact?

Tracking my time confirmed my general sense that working for certain high-paying clients is a very good idea. When I compared hours worked to monthly revenues I saw that I earn about 10 times as much from my top-paying customers as I do from my lowest-paying ones. It would be smart, I realize, to solicit more work and more referrals from these most lucrative clients.

5. What am I not doing enough of?

What you're not doing is at least as important as what you are doing. For example, the report shows I've only spent about an hour and a half on social media in the last month. That's misleading since I do much of my social media posting from my smartphone or tablet, in snatches of time between other tasks, so it doesn't show up in the report. Even so, that low number is disturbing--I ought to be devoting more energy to my social media profile.

And I definitely will start spending more time on promotion, something that came in at even less time last month than social media did. That's a real red flag. It's easy to get caught up in the crush of meeting deadlines and forget that it takes regular promotion to stay visible in the marketplace. But then, that's the beauty of tracking your time. It lets you see the big picture.

MINDA ZETLIN , a business technology writer and speaker, co-author of "The Geek Gap," and president of the American Society of Journalists and Authors.
http://www.inc.com/minda-zetlin/5-reasons-to-track-your-time.html