TimeSnapper is a set it and forget it tool. It takes ZERO time for it to track your activities, which should be substantially less than any spreadsheet-oriented tool. The only time you’ll spend with it is in analyzing the numbers, which should also be more accurate than anything entered by hand.

Cheers.

I see where you are coming from now, and think this is a fantastic way of analyzing where your time is going. I believe I misunderstood your original post.

Even Guru Tim would say this is a good thing. He says in his book that he took a full day to look at what his time wasters were, at work, in his personal life, everywhere. This is what you’re doing as well.

When things are so busy that you can’t really take a day off without the world crumbling, then taking bites out of it like this may be the only route you can take. Though I’d bet the world wouldn’t crumble, we just feel like it would.

At any rate, Rex, great post and I think you’re on to something. Once you’ve spent time recording your time, and analyzing, you can determine where the majority of your time is being spent.

Of course this is more of a reactionary approach then a proactive approach of deciding what is important and doing it, versus having others decide what is important. But of course we don’t all get to decide that, but we CAN decide how to accomplish the end result, which is exactly why we could do in 2 hours what somebody else might spent 2 days on. Tim’s example of calling before and after the ‘gatekeepers’ went home is perfect. It’s that type of thinking, that “don’t follow the herd” mentality that makes you effective.

Let us know how it goes – I’m very interested in seeing what insights you gain from this experiment!