Time tracking for productivity

On how to trust that you're doing enough

Tending as an approach to knowledge work often looks like making tiny efforts. It requires trust that those tiny efforts will, in fact, lead to big rewards. Rather than working for an uninterrupted four-hour block of time that you don’t have, for example, work in twenty-minute gaps between meetings. In a previous post I asked readers to trust in their small work efforts, even if those efforts are distracted and only for a few minutes. I was skeptical of metrics for measuring some kinds of work that do not easily break down into smaller tasks, like writing a scholarly article. That is, if you’re grading quizzes, you can check off that you’ve spent twenty minutes grading fifteen out of thirty quizzes. But how do you account for twenty minutes of work on a bigger, more amorphous project?

Here I want to offer a strategy that I’m genuinely enthusiastic about because it has worked very well to help me to trust in the value of small amounts of time: time tracking. This is not a novel concept—people who bill by the hour track billable time and productivity author Laura Vanderkam famously recommends tracking your time 24/7. The professional development organization called the NCFDD teaches university faculty to track time spent on research, teaching, and service (the three big components of an academic job) comparatively to ensure they are working a proper balance.

My use of time tracking is a little bit different, more specific to the issues I’m concerned with here. I categorize my time tracking such that I can see the amount of time I spend on particular projects. It looks like this: I use the app Toggl, which offers a perfectly adequate free plan, to track all of the time I spend working. I maintain three “projects” in Toggl lingo (research, teaching, service, which each get their own color), and then within these I create separate entries for different things. If I’m writing a scholarly article, I track all the work for that article under the same time entry label, the result being that when I’m done with the article, I can use the “reports” feature to see how much total time I spent working on that article. Similarly, I track teaching time by class so that at the end of the semester I can see how much time I spent on each class. I have data on how much time I spend advising a particular graduate advisee, how much time I spend on various administrative committees, how much time I spend dealing with basic emails, etc.

I can also look at this data by day: I can see by color how much time I spent on research, teaching, and service each day, and I can also see how much time I spent on each task. Did I spend too much time grading and too little time revising my monograph? I can think about that at the end of the day.

All this time tracking yields very interesting data. At this point I know how long it takes me to write a scholarly article or book chapter that is on a new topic I am less familiar with (90–100 hours), versus how long it takes me to write a scholarly article or book chapter that is on a topic I’m very familiar with (50–60 hours). It takes me 12 hours to write a scholarly book review (including reading the book). It takes me 10 hours to design a syllabus for a new course for university approval. I spent 192 hours revising my first monograph after peer review. I spend about 16 hours a year doing service for a professional organization. Your numbers may be different: that is not the point.

I also know that a day spent working over 7 hours (this is actual tracked work time, not including time taking a break) is an exhausting day, probably one in which I taught classes and did a lot of grading or other less cognitively demanding tasks. A really productive research day, where I’m doing a lot of intense reading and writing (and not much teaching or service work), usually clocks in at more like 4–5 hours. This is useful information because it helps me plan how much I can reasonably get done in a day and know whether I’ll have time to run any errands or do some laundry (if working from home).

Once you know how long it takes you to do a certain kind of project, like writing an article, you can actively incorporate that information into your planning and working process. You can anticipate the amount of time you’ll need, so that you get started sufficiently early, and you can also judge whether you even have that much time to devote—or should just say no.

You can also use this information to help yourself trust in the working process. Here’s where I find time tracking enormously beneficial psychologically. If I’m writing an article and am starting to get frustrated with it and feeling like I’ll never get it done, I look at how much time I’ve spent on it. In fact, I do this so often that I’ve noticed a pattern: I tend to get frustrated around the 20–30 hour mark. But this is still over 20 hours, even 60 hours if it’s a new topic for me, away from completion! I see that I’m less than halfway there, that I still have many hours ahead, and what’s more, that I can still get this done. These moments have been very calming for me, teaching me to trust the writing process despite my doubts.

Time tracking has also taught me to work, rather than to procrastinate. I promise a proper “getting things done” post soon, but here I will say that knowing that I’m essentially counting down total time on a project is motivating. It helps me stop dilly-dallying around and actually get to work. Even if I only have ten minutes, I can make them count.

I’m an evangelist of time tracking—I tell all my graduate students to do it. Hence I’m writing about it here. But I do think it is very useful for reminding us that small slivers of time do count. The minutes add up. Our days are fragmented, and our attention is fragmented. But the fragments can lead to a whole.