I’m not sure if this is a standard tool, but I created it for myself to start seeing where my time was going and thought it could be valuable to others. Your personal time is valuable. And like anything valuable, you need to know what’s happening on a regular basis. It may not seem sensible at first, but I suggest creating what I call a time cost table. At the heart of it is knowledge — knowledge of where your valuable time is going. It is flexible in that you can use it in a relaxed or a strict way and still receive the benefits of using it.
So here’s what it looks like:
| Start Time | End Time | Duration | Item |
| 7:02 pm | 8:15 pm | 1 hr 13 min | Studied for GMAT – quantitative section |
| 8:16 pm | 8:45 pm | 30 min | Ate Dinner |
| 8:46 pm | 10:32 pm | 1 hr 46 min | Studied again for GMAT |
| - | - | - | Total for the day: 2 hr 59 min GMAT // 30 min break |
To use it, simply create your own in a word processing suite etc. using the full page and the column headers in the example and start writing down start time and end times for work and break blocks. If you are working on homework, write it down. If you are watching TV, write it down. I try to imagine that I’m being paid for work or a goal for a certain day, say studying for GMAT for example, and that I have to work 7 hours for example on a free Saturday. By writing down the time, I can see where I take breaks, how long I take it, when I wake up, how long I actually study and subsequently how much I should be ‘paid’ for my time. Lawyers and other professionals use the concept of billable hours and a plan like this makes it easy to see how many hours are you billing per day. Imagine billing 9 hours per day for a goal, can you do it? What about 13? Now that’s hard.
Hopefully this helps make you more productive, procrastinate less, and reach and plan your goals accordingly.
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you had a 30 min. break; was this break necessary due to physical need or play or interruption since the actual productive time was only 2hrs, well about 3 hrs. What exactly was your goal? motivation that inspired you?
Thanks for the virtual kick in the butt; I certainly need it sometimes. In this case though, I left out some details about the example table that I should have mentioned.
Firstly, the reason I created the sample time cost table was to use it as an example of myself coming home from work. Because of work being left out in this table, anything before 7 pm was not logged. So from 7 pm, the 30 minute break was cooking and eating, which are both necessary expenditures for the day and labeled as ‘Ate Dinner’ on the chart. What was good from this example table is that, if I get home at 7 pm, and I use the 3 hours of the 3.5 hours you have before you sleep (say at 11 pm after a shower in my case), I would call that a very productive day. Think of the other ways you could have used the time: napping, watching TV, checking email, writing on the blog… In this case, I had a goal I was working towards, which was to do well on the GMAT. I helped get closer to that goal by using the free time wisely on this particular evening. Say you are doing a time cost table for a Saturday, you should fill it out completely by beginning the log when you wake up. Track everything you do down to the minute and see how much time you use on tasks not associated with achieving your goals. Hopefully, you will notice a pattern by being attentive to how you spend your time, which should subsequently allow you to alter your behavior to better accomplish your goals. Lately, like I mentioned in the post, I’ve started to use it as a challenge for the day by seeing how many hours I can get of productive time. By doing this, it helps me stay on top of my time rather than watching the television and literally watching the time fly by. Of course, everyone needs downtime or their brains would explode. So be rational about it, but take it seriously, and you should start to see your productivity soar.