I Dare You to Track Your Time

I dare you to write down everything you do and the amount of time you spend doing it for three days.

I dare you to start tracking every activity from the moment you get up in the morning (including the time you get up) until the time you go to bed for 72 straight hours.

I dare you to track how much time you spend in your email inbox. In fact, I double dog dare you. I dare you to track how much time you spend surfing the web, and sitting on social media sites.

I dare you to track how much time you spend on unscheduled, informal, unnecessary, or slightly amusing conversations with your peers. I dare you to keep track of exactly how many times your interrupted during the day (If you’re not in double digits by noon, I’ll eat my hat).

I dare you to write down exactly how much time you spent over these three days working on the biggest most important projects or goals in your life. I dare you to write down how much time you spent exactly with the three or four most important people in your life.

I dare you to track the time you spent doing proactive, meaningful, value creating work over a 72-hour period.

Most of what is urgent is important. That’s why it’s urgent in a lot of cases. But when you do this exercise, I think you’ll find that a lot of what you spend your time on isn’t important or urgent (To borrow liberally from the late, great Stephen Covey).

Questions

Where do you invest most of your time?

How much time do you spend on unimportant non-urgent tasks that do nothing to move you closer to your real goals?

What has to change for you to be able to devote more of your time to what’s most important?

Who is missing from this list? What do you need to do about that?

There is no such thing as time management. Do you have a “me management” problem?