I’ve discovered a few things about myself in my quest to become a more organized person. One of the most interesting things I discovered is that I’m usually not as busy as I think I am.
Before I started tracking time, I felt that I was working all day, every day and night, trying to get things done, without seeing too many results. I thought that was because I had so many things to do, that I could never ever reach a point were my todo list would get small enough for me to be happy.
Then, I started tracking the hours I worked on my projects, and I realized that most of my time was spent in reading emails, visiting youtube, or simply, doing nothing (actually, not doing nothing, but just sitting infront of the pc, not knowing what to do because “I had to many things to do and didn’t know which to start with”). I realized that I wasn’t putting as much effort as I could.
Time tracking let me set a minimum of hours I wanted to work on certain things. I constantly look at my hours log and check if I’m really working or not. If I see that I’m not, I force myself to focus and just do what I need to do.
I think that time tracking has helped me become more productive and organized, although I still think there’s a lot of things I need to improve before convincing myself that I’m an organized person.
Great post, I felt the same way as you did! My New Years resolution was to buckle down excellent time management skills.
ReplyDeleteThe first and most powerful step I took was tracking my time. I'm a freelancer and work from home so I had never put much thought in to what I was actually doing with my day/time. After I have started, I feel a lot more organized now and can cross more things off my to do list. I actually took on more clients as well :) The time tracking system that I found and love is TSheets, http://www.tsheets.com. I also use it for invoicing my clients, which is another plus and another thing that puts me closer to excellent time management skills.