Are you aware of your hourly usage?
Have you ever checked?
Do you feel you are spending every day productively? or wasteful?
This would be a highly subjective analysis unless you record it.
I suggest that you record your activity at least 1 week, preferably 2 weeks.
Such that you can find out your sweet spot yourself
Once the sweet spot is figured, you can plan the important task into that sweet spot going forward 🙂
I’m sure this is a bit of a meticulous tedious task, but it’s worth trying.
How to do it?
1. Every hour, you record
Every hour / few hours, you record what you did the past hour(s).
2. Sorting them into Productive vs Wasteful
At the end of the day, you can categorize the hours usage into 2 categories – Productive or Wasteful
3. Keep doing that 1 week
4. Review at the end of the week
After the completion of this self-test
You will know your trend such as…
- What time is your PRIME hour
- Which Date is your PRIME date
- Which Date / Time is Graveyard slots
- What types of tasks are easier / worse than other tasks
- many more…
Once you know your behavior pattern, you can schedule better next time.
The Challenge you may face during this self-test
This often happens to me, but I believe this is not just me…
Once I started to see many wasteful time during this self-test, I lost motivation to keep doing this; however, this type of person is the ones who need to understand time usage. So let’s keep trying. You will see many findings about you at the end. This is like a game.
My Case
The above is the my record from past.
(if you do not have planner with hourly table, you can just use the 1 piece of paper, or use google calendar.)
After recording, I put the color for each activity like below :
– Blue : Productive time (for work)
– Green: Meaningful time (for health)
– Red: Wasteful time (web browsing, Netflix, SNS, etcetera..)
My Take Away from this test is
– Monday and Tuesday is a good performing day
– After Wednesday, wasteful time starts to emerge
– Wasteful time seems to occur afternoon.
– I am spending avg. 6-7 hours/day for my work
– I am spending avg. 4-5 hours/day for health
– I am wasting avg. 4-5 hours/day
Next Step could be…
– Plan for important tasks on morning slots every day.
– Plan for important tasks on Monday / Tuesday.
– Think of how to suppress the wasteful time.
Conclusion
If you want to improve your productivity, you should know about yourself first.
So that you know where you are standing today, and you will know where you will be standing by comparing this self-test result.
Resources
You can check other contents for your productivity enhancement.
