Money and time are similar. We only have a limited amount of each, and we have to use what we have wisely. To manage our money, better financial advisors suggest we track our money spending habits. We can use this same technique and track our time spending habits in a productivity journal.
What Is a Productivity Journal?
Long gone are the days of Dear Diary books filled with vague goals, emotional tirades, and details about your celebrity crush. A productivity journal is a practical account, or detailed list, of daily activity for a few weeks. By tracking how we spend our time, we can recognize unconscious habits and identify cumbersome processes that bog us down. These discoveries will help us learn where we can improve our effectiveness. You might think you don’t have time to keep a journal because you already have so much to do. While journaling can be a laborious process (especially if you have several celebrity crushes), productivity journaling is paired with time tracking to provide a more objective view of your activities.
What Is Time Tracking?
Financial planners want us to record every expense right down to the penny. With time tracking, you record the time you spend on each activity right down to the minute. It’s a tedious task, but some tools and apps can help. With any of the following time tracking apps, you quickly and easily start and stop the timer as you work on your projects. The app tracks what you are working on. You can sync with the smartphone app so you can track activities while you are away from your desk. At the end of the day or week, examine the reports and see how you spent your time.
- Harvest: Free plan for one user.
- Toggl: Free for up to 5 users in a team, but some features are limited.
- Rescue Time: Free 14-day trial.
- Clockify: Free for teams. Integrates with many web apps for easier tracking.
- Timeular: Free plan for one user.
If you prefer working with paper, find a nice notebook or a calendar-type planner. Ideally, it should be separate from your appointment book. Use your time-tracking planner only to track how you spent your time, not how you expect to spend your time.
The Synergy of Both
Time tracking apps ensure you designate the right amount of time to the right project and meet your billable hour limits. These apps tell you where and how you are spending your time. But they do not provide insight into why some days are more productive than others. That’s where the productivity journal comes in. You look at your journal entries in conjunction with your time tracking report for deeper understanding. In the Time Tracking Report image below, the person is not as productive on Wednesday or Thursday as the other days of the week. When the person looks in their productivity journal, they may find eating dinner late on Wednesday caused poor sleep Wednesday night, which decreased productivity on Thursday. It’s not often this obvious. However, if you journal over several weeks, you may discover some trends. 
Information to Record
You won’t have time to write down every little detail in your journal, but there are some things to keep track of:
- Sleep: bedtime, wake time, quality of sleep
- Eating: what meals and snacks you ate and when, how much you drank: water, caffeinated drinks, sugary drinks, alcohol
- Physical activity: what activities you did, when, and for how long
- Projects: what you worked on and when (use your time tracker)
- Leisure: what you did, when and for how long
- Interactions: who you talked to, when, quality of conversation.
For each activity, record your emotional state to determine if that influences your productivity. A phone call with a friend might lift your spirits and boost your productivity. You can describe your feelings in words or simply add an emoji. See the Emojipedia for a detailed meaning of all those little faces and symbols.
Now that you know how productivity journals and time trackers work together try them out for a couple of weeks. If you find you still need some assistance, contact the Out of Chaos team, today.
Image by rawpixel.
