The Power of a Time Log

 By guest author Logan Strain

Step number one towards squeezing the most productivity possible out of every day is keeping a time log.  This means for seven days, you should keep track of how you spend your time.  Record how long it takes you to get ready in the morning, track how many minutes you spend eating breakfast, clock your commute, etc.  It sounds like it might be tedious to log every single minute of your day, but by the second day it will feel totally natural.  At the end of the week, add up every activity 

If you are like most people, you will be shocked by how your time is distributed. You will finally be able to see, in black in white, how much time you waste checking email too often, obsessing over tasks that don’t really benefit you, and perhaps even commuting.  The average full time office worker spends only a fraction of the time in the office actually working, and that goes even for diligent business owners such as yourself.

Most importantly, when you see this log, you will be able to observe what your most efficient hours are.  Did you get the most work done in the morning? The afternoon? Right after a meal?  Knowing what your most productive time of the day is will let you know when your time is the most valuable.  After all, you want every hour you spent at work to be actually worth your time, so do what you can to make sure you don’t go over that. You will also be able to see work items that took you a long time.  With these tasks, you should probably calculate if it would simply be more cost effective to outsource.  Why waste three hours doing something when it can take an outsourced professional just a single billed hour to complete?

This has been a time management post by Logan Strain for Kick Back Life, a marketing techniques for personal trainers website with high quality content added on a regular basis