Using a Time Tracker to Decide What To Do

Occasionally I will review my blogging stats, get really discouraged at not building up traffic more quickly, and strike up a conversation with Thomas or Lance on whether it is worthwhile for me to continue blogging. I picture people standing around at my funeral and saying, “well after he retired, he watched X-Files reruns and blogged.” Then, I think to myself, what do I care what they say: I’ll be dead.

Seriously, I have wondered whether I might do better by spending less time blogging and more time on other things, but I ultimately wind up reminding myself I enjoy blogging. But, sometimes I feel like I spend too much time on it. So, I decided to monitor how much time I spend on it. This turned out to be very revealing, and makes me realize that we do not always accurately perceive how we spend our time, and it is good to measure it, at least occasionally.

So, I did a quick Google search for “time tracker mac” and came up with the following:

I began using it and have done a good job of tracking the blogging time that I spend at the computer. I do not use it to track any blogging activities I do away from the computer, and I’ll have more to say about that momentarily.

Here’s a screenshot of my computer time spent from about 9:00AM to 6:30PM on 15 January:

What insights did I get from this?

• I spend a lot of time looking at feeds. During the time shown (1 hour and 6 minutes) I looked at over 600 feed headlines, and clicked through to read only about 10 of those headlines. That is a lot of time spent for very little in return. The reason I look at so many feeds is to try to find good links for you folks. But the time spent in proportion to the number of worthwhile links found is just too large. The 1 hr and 6 min figure is only part of a day … a full day’s worth is probably closer to an hour and a half.
• I spent too much time on design tweaks, again. Yeah, we all know I need to stop fiddling with that … it eats up a good bit of time and ultimately makes no real difference in the quality of the blog.
• Actual writing time is pretty small. Not nearly as much as I would have thought it would be. Turns out I am more efficient at that than I believed I was.

I also learned that I have the perception of spending a lot of time on blog-related activities because my mind is counting the time I spend wondering about what I will write next. I feel like this is a lot of time, but I do not know how much it really is. I think I am actually overestimating it by a lot. What would be much better would be for me to just dedicate 30 minutes a week or so, maybe an hour, brainstorming topics. That is all it would take. Yet, I know my mind right now is “feeling like” I spend 20 hours a week on this. If I am spending that much, it sure is inefficient. But, I don’t think I am spending that much.

So, that is kind of an important reminder to me: when something keeps running through your head, schedule some time to just deal with it. Chances are you will spend less time on it and be more effective at it as well. Also, like me, you can probably find where there are some time-wasters. I have got to do something about the feeds situation. I probably need to eliminate some of the lower-return feeds.

So, I am glad I found a nice, free time tracker. If you have a Mac, you might want to try this one out as well. Otherwise, I am sure there are nice freebie-time-trackers for Windows and Linux that you can find with a quick googling.

Tagged as: Google, technology