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You might be thinking, “why would I ever want to keep a time journal for 24 hours? What good would that do me?” And I’m here to tell you; it will do you great. This is why you should keep a time journal for 24 hours.

First of all, what is a time journal?

A time journal records how you spend every minute of your time for a set period of time. In this case, 24 hours. Yes, down to the minute. Not just the chunks or hours or estimates of what you think you have been doing with your time (or what you are planning to do with your time) but down to the actual minute by minute record of how you spend the next 24 hours of your life.

What are the benefits of having a time journal?

Having a time journal can help you be honest with yourself about where you spend your time. It will give you an accurate representation of how much of your day you spend working, eating, scrolling on social media, taking care of household tasks, commuting, socializing and anything else that you do.

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It will help you see visually if the way that you are spending your time reflects the values and goals that you have. If you want to have a value of spending time with your partner every night but instead see that you spend seven minutes with them and two hours scrolling through the newest videos on TikTok, a time journal will help you see that.

Another benefit of using a time journal is for tasks that you feel like you are just too busy to do, like loading the dishwasher, sending that one follow-up email or putting something away. When you are creating a time journal down to the minute and you are timing how long it takes you to do these tasks, you can see in concrete, hard numbers how long they actually take. Case in point, washing the dishes typically takes me 3 minutes, even though I always feel like I don’t have enough time to do them right now.

A time journal also helps you feel more productive and less busy. It shows you how much you are actually getting done every day. It can show you how few minutes certain tasks do actually take and the sheer amount of stuff that you can get done in a day.

It will also show you if you are spending way too long on a task. If you have a report that you need to create every week and it is taking you three hours when it should really only take you forty-five minutes, a time journal will bring some awareness to how long it is actually taking you. This can be the first step to either getting rid of the task completely, delegating it, automating some part of it or changing it in some way so that it is not taking up so much of your time.

So, how do I create a time journal anyways?

There are two ways to do this. The first one is to write down your day and how you spend your time minute by minute by hand.

7:00-7:05 get out of bed and make coffee

7:05-7:25 have coffee and scroll through social media

7:25-7:39 take shower

7:39-7:42 get dressed

7:42-7:47 pack up work bag and leave apartment

7:47-8:10 commute to work

You want to include everything you do in a day in a time journal.

The other way to do a time journal is to use an app. I use the app Toggl Track for this purpose. Toggl Track is an app built for tracking workflow time for different projects. I set up different projects in Toggl to account for different ways I spend my time during the day. There is a project for working, commuting, health, family, excess, household management, neutral, planning, personal, sleep, social, and reading.

Household management is anything that has to do with keeping a household running: washing dishes, doing laundry, making the bed, tidying up.

Neutral is for things that I do everyday: showering, getting ready, etc.

Personal is for things that I want to do like exchanging a pair of jeans for another size or engaging in a hobby.

Excess is for anything I am doing that I want to cut back on like scrolling social media or watching too much tv.

You can create projects as you start to enter tasks you are doing into your time journal and group things together as you see fit into different categories. Depending on what you do, you may want to split your working time into different categories such as meetings, admin work and revenue-generating work.

Make sure that you log every minute of a 24 hour period. Also, pick any day to do this. It doesn’t have to be a work day or a weekend or a special day or a day where you think you are going to be most productive. The best day to pick is right now because doing a time journal will give you so much insight.

Once you have completed a time journal for 24 hours, analyze it.

If you did your time journal by hand this may take a little longer but if you used Toggl Track you will be able to see a visual representation of how you are spending your day grouped by the different projects that you created.

You may be surprised by how much time you are spending on social media or how few minutes it actually takes you to fold your laundry.

Awareness is the first step to change so if there is any way that you want to be spending your time differently, a time journal is a great first step.

A Final Note on Time Journals

A time journal is a great way to see how you are spending your day, to see how long things actually take you and not how long you think they take you, to see if you are living according to your values and to help you plan your future.