time tracking

Missed Part 1? Click here to read it.

So, as I alluded to in Part 1, Monday and Tuesday (days 1 and 2) were meh in terms of rocking this 5 day I Dare You to Track challenge. No light bulb moments. No down and dirty despair. Not much of anything except bit of annoyance at having to give focused activity a useful name and remembering to start and and stop the dang timer … which I admit I sometimes forgot to do or just ignored doing for certain activities.

Then Came Wednesday full of surprise and discoveries

On Wednesday I decided if I was going to get any benefit from this challenge — and, frankly, why would I bother continuing if there wasn’t? — something needed to change. Early in the day I decided to check out more fully a different online time tracking app called Clockify that many of my fellow challengers, including host Kelly McCausey, were extolling the virtues of.

There is a robust free version forever version I had actually signed up for earlier in the week but only played with the browser version a few times, which I liked a whole lot better than Toggl but still triggered my time-tracking annoyance level.

The Game Changing Moment

Then I discovered Clockify’s desktop version. Holy cow! Suddenly I’m falling in love with this free little bundle of time-management app. I found it so intuitively easy to use that my prior annoyance at starting and stopping for each focused activity became … dare I say it? … fun!

More importantly, what I started noticing were behaviors about my use of time, plus ways to better estimate how long certain tasks took me to do. And where I actually was … and wasn’t … spending focused time on. Ouch!

It all started when challenge master Kelly McCausey, from Love People & Make Money, invited us to read Gay Hendricks’ book, The Big Leap, which is all about how we often settle for living our lives in zones other than our Zone of Genius. In other words, how we limit ourselves, sometimes unconsciously, sometimes not.

Then we were to track how we were using our time for a minimum of five straight work days. What would we discover about our habits? Did we really know what we did in a day? How long certain tasks took to complete? How long we spent hanging out on social media sites like Facebook?

Were we consciously spending time engaged in our Zone of Genius activities? More importantly, if we weren’t, why not?

I got this. Piece of Cake.

Now I had already read The Big Leap numerous times. In fact, borrowed it from the library so often that I finally bought my own copy. I frequently recommend and even refer to that book in many of my workshops.