Doing Time – STP044

Episode 44 - Can you rely on time? Can you manage it? What were you doing with yours 3 days ago at 3:15 pm? Wanna find out? Then have a listen!

Some of the USEFUL stuff in there is:

• Time management doesn't work
• What does 'time' even mean?
• Could we change how we measure time - some people already have
• Time seems to stretch depending on what you are doing
• Psychology Today explains why the years pass faster as you get older
• Terry - come one, give him a chance! At least his facts are real
• The earth doesn't revolve every 24 hours
• The French tried to 'decimalise' time - TWICE!
• In the Soviet Union, they changed the length of the week 3 times in the 20th Century
• Changing your approach to what fills your day could work two ways:
• Getting more done in the same time
• Doing the same amount in less time
• Which one do you want? They're both good for different reasons
• Lunchtime - how do you do yours?
• Why measuring 'performance' just based on how many hours someone works may not be useful
• Is it time to find out what fills your 168 hours?
• E-mails take up more than we think, according to - Forbes.com
• That's just e-mails; where are your other 'time-thieves'?

Track your time - it's VERY revealing

• The Art of Manliness wrote - this article on the subject
• You can do it in different ways - one way is with apps
• Here's one 
• The one we used was - Toggl
• Consider how you're going to track your time with an app; there are 2 key ways:
• Every time you start a new task, log it
• Checking in each 15/30 minutes and logging what you've been doing
• The great thing about Toggl is that you can select categories and tags
• My categories were:
• Work-reactive actions (meetings, resolving stuff etc)
• Work - proactive actions (planning, developing, strategy)
• Routines
• Travel
• Calls
• Self-development
• Eating
• Family time
• Relaxing
• Meditating
• Messing about
• Podcast production
• Instead of apps, try tracking time using a paper-based method
• Decide on doing weekday/weekend or both
• Log actions every 15/30 minutes (you decide)
• Write EVERYTHING down - including messing about time (e.g. social media scrolling)
• Be honest
• Suspend judgement until you've finished
• Do it for at least 1 week - 2 if you can
• If you want to - log it on paper first (the raw activities) and then put into Toggl afterwards
• You can then categorise, and Toggl gives you reports in different ways
• Take what you've learned and use it to inform what steps you want to take
• Go and look at any of our other episodes to work on what you've decided on
• A good place to start if you want to plan your day better is Episode 35
• We discovered that Terry needs some equipment training!