Time track by Paul Lemberg.

Want a breakthrough in how you use your time?

Find out where you currently spend it! If you’ve never tracked how you spend your time, you may be in for a surprise.

There are a few ways to do this.  

One is to note the timeat a the beginning of each task, and at the end, logging the difference. The hard part of this system is handling interruptions. You might start working on a report at 10:15 and finish at 3:30. That’s 5-1/4 hours, except that you spent 45 minutes at lunch and took a bunch of phone calls.

Another way is to write down what you’ve been doing for the past 15 minutes, every quarter hour. I prefer this method. It makes it easier to account for “interruptions”, lunch or multitasking.

Some people like to track this on their computer. Unless you have a pocket computer or PDA, I suggest you use pen and paper. It’s much more portable. Get a stack of 3x5 index cards or a spiral pocket notepad.

Start a fresh page for every day, and make a new entry every 15 minutes.

Do this for at least two weeks, or longer if you can stand it. No matter how long you go, you will learn a lot. When you are done, summarize where your timehas gone.

You may be shocked, but you’ll know where you stand.

Now that you have a baseline, you can make some management decisions. You may find you are spending way too much timeon correspondence – voice mail, emails, etc. Perhaps you are in too many long meetings. Or your travel time to clients is unreasonably long. Or whatever.

The possibleproblems are far too numerous to list, but each problem presents an opportunity for streamlining your operation and creating a breakthrough in time and productivity.

Have everyone in your talent pool do this. Trim the time wasters.

Copyright 2002-04 ©Paul Lemberg used with his expressed written permission

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