Great response. Sure, I’d love to see your spreadsheet. Can you email it to me and I’ll post to share with others?

In the meantime, I have done what you have asked in my spreadsheet — each task has a column that requires you to specify whether it should be Eliminated, Automated, Outsourced, or Repeated. Does this not serve the purpose you describe above?

I like your classification system, tho. It might be easier to see trends that way. I have a Category column in my spreadsheet, but I guess that doesn’t serve that purpose?

Send me what you got, I’ll merge with what I have and post a result!

rexreed, by reading your post, I’d suspect that you are halfway forgetting about two of Tim’s key Elimination points – 80/20 and Parkinson’s Law. If I’m reading it right, those went further to reducing his workload than outsourcing or interrupting interruption.

Of course, Tim gave us great info on the 80/20 and Parkinson’s law stuff, but he didn’t tell us *how* he figured out what the key 20% was – for example, he came to the conclusion that only 5 of his clients gave him most of his money… so he must have already had those figures tracked for easy analysis OR he must have spent days calculating it all up in order to figure this out. I wonder which? So, I’m assuming your spreadsheet is intended to tell you that.

So, here’s the thing about 80/20, in my mind – you have to group your activities so you can evaluate and compare them in sum. Otherwise you’re just lost in the details.

And the key questions are:
- how much of your time and/or money did it cost you?
- what did you get out of it?
- was it the key 20% or can you eliminate it?
- could you outsouce or automate it?
- what’s your overall conclusion?

So I’d have a spreadsheet (and now I’m thinking about doing this myself) that lists Functions (Accounting, Marketing, Communications, Coding, etc.), and then Accounts (Davidson Account, Texas Monthly Promotion, Muse #1, etc.) with “Activity,” “Time cost”, “Financial cost,” “Why did you do this? (payoff)” “Outsource/Automate/Eliminate?”

I would list each thing I did under the appropriate Function and then duplicate each entry for the relevant Account. Forget about -when- you did them, don’t list in order or by day – that is extraneous data.

So, “Phone call / 20 minutes / $0 / Davidson Account / n/a” goes under Communications AND “Phone call / 20 minutes / $0 / $3,000 account / n/a” goes under Davidson Account.

Do you see? (Hard to imagine without drawing it out.) This means you can now scan each Function and Account to draw conclusions based on the big picture. You can see which Accounts take more time and compare to their payoff. You can see which Functions take time but could be Outsourced… which ones could be Eliminated… etc. You can see that you’ve spent 13 hours on the phone so far.. and half of that on one client… You can note the date you started keeping the log and count days & divide to get averages (such as 3 hours a day on the phone). This should be much easier to look at than the itemized listing.

Finally, how to handle efficiency issues. I would say track only actual time worked in the above system. On a separate page or in a separate chart, track time lost due to inefficiencies. List cause, number of times it’s happened so far (running tally), time lost to it so far (running total), and what you’re going to do about it.

So, I might list, “Wrote blog post instead of working / 1 time / 2.5 hours / Put sticky note on monitor – SAVE PERSONAL BLOG POSTS TILL VACATION”

Guilty as charged, and now going back to work… -laugh-

I have written up a sample spreadsheet as described above while writing this post – let me know if you want me to email it to you.

Good response, but I think you’re missing the point about why I’m doing this. I’m trying to find out where I’m losing my time. This is not meant to be something to be used if you are already time efficient. The point is that I’m still working 12+ hour days and not getting any closer to my 4HWW goal. Part of the problem is that I’m already doing too much… I’m already task switching, so I’m not making the problem any worse by doing some analysis.

This is an analysis tool, not a management tool. If you already know where your time is going, then don’t use this sheet! This sheet won’t help you, and in fact, as you mention, it will be a hindrance.

The point here is for those who are already cramming a hundred tasks into a single day, is to find out what tasks are the time-wasters, which tasks are the ones to accentuate. This is purely an analysis tool, not a tool for running something once you’ve already achieved the efficiency point.

In any case, I spend (no joke) 2 minutes on this spreadsheet first thing in the morning assigning tasks and allocating time, and then 30 seconds on this spreadsheet after each task recording how much time it took. No more time than that. No need to put “work on the spreadsheet” in the spreadsheet.

Make sense?

I love the spirit of your post and the drive behind what you’re wanting to do. My beef with it though is that I’m wondering how much time you’ll spend on the spreadsheet? Won’t it be counter productive? Knowing it’s always waiting, being obligated to put your info into it, and God forbid, you get behind a day or two and you don’t have accurate data any longer. Kind of reminds me of a Dilbert cartoon where they had to have a pre-meeting to the meeting! You may want to put “work on spreadsheet” in your spreadsheet

I’ve faced this dilemma myself recently, but only because my customer wanted to know how many hours I had been working on each case on a weekly basis. So I tracked it in a spreadsheet. I searched far and wide for time tracking tools that met my requirements, and I even have a few ideas of my own in that area, but I came to one conclusion: tracking my time became a task that consumed the time.

If what Tim says is right, about losing time when task switching (up to 45 minutes in some cases), then task switching to record your task also seems counter productive to the “big 3″ tasks of the day that several folks have commented on (including Tim).

I haven’t thought very deeply yet on how I will go about it in the future, but right now I’ve just been estimating my time on a weekly basis. But if I was tracking it for myself, my measurement wouldn’t necessarily be time, my measurement would be progress.

We have to get out of this mode of thinking that time is the important factor here. Well, it is in the sense that we have so little of it left in our lives and must use it wisely; but I don’t think it’s a good measurement. I’d say that rather than having an hour by hour spreadsheet, I’d have a progress spreadsheet (if you’re going to use a spreadsheet at all)

My previous boss was a total jerk (that’s just an aside, by the way). He was a project management guy that came from a big consulting firm and he was a political mastermind, but he used his powers for evil instead of good. He could create work for work’s sake and make us look extremely busy while being utterly unproductive. He said “You can’t manage what you don’t measure”. I don’t completely go along with that.

When things matter, like how much revenue you’re bringing in and from what sources, that’s a good time to measure and manage so you can refocus when necessary.

But what are you really measuring with time tracking tools? Do we think that because we spent X hours on something that it has a direct link to how much progress we’ve made? If that’s true, then the whole concept of the four hour work week crumbles.

Now of course completing something takes time, and it can be argued whether or not setting false deadlines can reduce the actual completion time, but -measuring- time for the sake of -managing- it seems, well, a waste of time.

I mean no disrespect to those who do track their time and have great success managing their tasks. I’m sure they’re very productive. But I just want to make sure we all keep focused on the fact that doing more things is not the goal: doing the right things is.

I also agree with your last statement: Be ruthless in your use of time and the rewards, hopefully should multiply.

Dave Ramsey, a financial power house in the consumer market (and featured on Fox Business frequently) has a saying: “Live like no one else, so that later, you can live like no one else” He’s talking about hunkering down and saving money, paying off debt, living within your means, etc. so that when the time comes (not necessarily retirement – the goal is still to have cash as quickly as possible) you can then live like no one else.

That applies here, I think, in the use of time. If you’re ruthless with your focus and time and don’t waste it, I agree, you’ll reap the rewards later, possibly exponentially.

And don’t forget what “the book” quotes of Herbert Bayard Swope: “I can’t give you a surefire formula for success, but I can give you a formula for failure: try to please everybody all the time”

Based on Swope’s statement, then if you’re frugal with who you’re trying to please, success is a more likely outcome.

Hey, are there any stairs off this soap box?