It is now 10 o’clock in the morning. I take a pen and make a tick mark on my daily planner next to the line “9.30 am - write”. I track my days in 30-minute increments, and the last 30 minutes have unfolded as I planned. Even though I have been doing this only over the previous seven days, the act of time tracking feels so familiar. I feel a sense of irony whenever I decide to restart the practice. It takes time to track time. Looking back, I am horrified at how much time I wasted trying to figure out where my hours went.
I started time tracking early on to get a sense of control over myself. I remember the first time I did time tracking as an eight-year-old. I started with my school’s schedule that ended around 2 pm, and then I extended it to about 8 pm. Each line in the time planner represented a 10-minute increment because I wanted to be exact! I smiled after making the plan as if I could somehow control my future self, but I forgot about it soon after and gave up immediately. Tracking time was too troublesome, so the plan didn’t even last until sunset.
The last time tracking I did was several years ago when I was working in my own business. Being productive was essential because I had to manage too many things in my head. I used an app, so every time I did something for more than 5 minutes, I would go into the app and labelled that chunk of time. I was a lot less specific with the categories. It was either work, play, relationship or mindless stuff (like shopping on my mobile).
I managed to turn it into a habit for six months. I did not do much planning, just tracking. At first, it gave me a sense of clarity. Every time I label what I was doing, it reminded me that I should not waste the remainder of the day. But the reminders turned into guilt trips, especially when I calculated how many hours I spent watching Youtube or reading the news. The guilt resulted in more unproductive days. I was relieved when I stopped tracking.
So why do it again?
Well, my son appeared recently (I did the whole getting pregnant thing like other mothers, but the realisation that I have a son still hit me like a clap of thunder), and now I have very little time for myself. It used to be that I could spare days watching Youtube, and now I do not feel like doing that anymore. I want more done out of my days to keep me sane in between the monotony of raising a newborn. It is hard to improve things when I do not even know how I spend my days.
The book 168 Hours by Laura Vanderkam inspires me to start again. She says our lives happen in a cycle of weeks rather than days. So it is not easy to plan what I do on Wednesdays based on what I do on Tuesdays. Instead, I should look at what happened last Wednesday. Planning today based on what I did seven days ago is a small but indispensable insight. Too often, planning seems pointless when my days differ so much with the week.
So far, I have done one week’s worth of time tracking. I tracked my time without any emphasis on planning my time. At the end of seven days, I got a baseline of how I spent my week, and then I made a realistic plan to improve my days. I tracked in 30 minutes increments, and if I could not remember what I did for that period, I wrote “not sure”, no big deal. Often I would do time tracking before I sleep or when I wake up in the morning.
I learn that time tracking is best thought of as “now tracking”. Asking “what am I doing now?” repeatedly throughout the day is almost like an extension of meditation. Being present at every moment is hard, so I am happy even when it happens only 2-3 times a day. I think there is very little use to planning the future or analysing the past if I cannot live in the present moment, no matter how rare I am aware of it throughout the day.
Now tracking reminds me that I choose what to do with the present moment at any point in time. I do not need more control over my future self nor blame my past self for what has happened. This time, I am using time tracking to be mindful of my now. If I end up using it to do anything more than that, I will stop, take a deep breath, and begin again.