Time Management - Lesson One: Your Activity Log

Whether you're the richest person in the world, or the poorest person in the world, you all have one thing in common. Each person is alloted twenty four hours each day.

What is the difference between your time allotment and someone else's?

We all need to sleep. Some people need less sleep than others. Some people add a couple of hours to their day by getting up two hours early to work on writing or other projects. Some people work better when they stay up two hours later at night. It all depends on individual energy levels and the way a person chooses to spend time.

Know where you're at to know where you're going

I think if you gave some thought to the question of how you spend your time each day you would likely think you have little wasted time at all. Most of us are scrambling from one activity to another trying to get it all done and the only time we do think about time is when we are late for an appointment.

One way to find out if where all your time goes is to start an activity log.

If you can keep track of activities for a week, that's great, but three days will do. One or two days is not really enough. In a pinch, try for one day a week during a three week period and vary the days. Keep track of the activities.

For instance, each time you change your activity make a note of the time you start and note the time that action ends. So each time you change a task, you'll be noting the time. Try not to miss out on any blocks of time. If you are cleaning the house you may want to break it down to something like:

8:00 Washed floors
8:30 Polished wood furniture
8:45 Dusted curtains
9:00 Read a novel
10:00 Talked on the telephone
10:20 Took dog for a walk
11:00 Made a cake
11:25 Telephone call
12:00 Lunch

Continue on throughout your day until bedtime.

Taking the log above, if you hadn't written down every single activity between 8:00 and 12:00, your view of how your time was spent might not include all activities. If your husband asked you, "What did you do this morning?" You may have said, "I worked all morning washing, polishing and baking."

Looking back at our log, we can clearly see that you only really spent 1 hour and 25 minutes washing, polishing and baking, the rest of your time was spent reading, walking and talking on the telephone. :)

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