Work From Home: Keeping Track of Time

Video Transcript

"When you are working from a home office it is really important to keep track of how you are using your time and I don't think you need to do that in an anal retentive way where you have lists and graphs and charts but there is an easy way to just kind of look at where you are using your time so you can kind of gage if you kind of need to make some adjustments. There is a lot of different programs that will automatically track what you spend your time doing automatically. It doesn't take any effort on your part. There are some really good programs. I happen to use Rescue Time and I'm not saying it's the best one and that you should use it but it works for me. What it does is that maybe about once a week I'll go and look at my stats and I'll see where I've been using my time. So it looks like over the last couple of days I've been using most of my time in Word, some of my time doing research with Google, on down the list. So other weeks it is a little more askew and I'll look at it and go oh my goodness did I really spend that much time checking e-mails, like that's out of control. There were a few times were I noticed these trends that I'm not happy with and so it's really helped me kind of get my life back on track, my work life back on track, to where I want to be. For example when I noticed that I was spending a disproportionate amount of time on e-mail, I didn't this week but when I did notice that, I was able to kind of set some limits myself, that I'm not going to write an e-mail unless it is less than five sentences long. I'm only going to check them once a day and then I was able to go on and get back on track and now I'm a lot more productive. So there is different applications like that. But the main thing is just kind of be aware of what you are using your time for. You don't want to be inadvertently putting your energy into areas that really aren't bringing you a lot of return on your investment on your time and energy investment."