In honor of this week’s Time Tracking Challenge, the Best of Both Worlds podcast is all about our favorite time management tips.
In this week’s episode, Sarah and I open with a discussion of time tracking. Then we talk about everything from sleep and exercise (they make time, they don’t take time) to acceptable forms of multi-tasking to getting adequate help.
In the Q&A we tackle a common question: If you know you want kids, when’s the “right” time to have them? (With my putting “right” in quotes, I think you might get a hint at my thoughts on this…).
Please give the episode a listen, and please share your favorite time management tips as well!
Hi! I maybe missed it (or need to go back to a prior episode), but what tools are you both using when you physically track your time? Is it an app? Or excel?
Thank you!
@Megan – I use Excel (well, really it’s “Numbers” – the apple spreadsheet app but it easily converts) and I use a 30-minute version. So it has the days of the week along the top, Monday to Sunday, and half hour blocks down the left hand side from 5 a.m. to 4:30 a.m. (this makes more intuitive sense for tracking a day than if the day starts at midnight…because I certainly don’t start the day at midnight!)
I believe Sarah uses a notebook…? She has very neat handwriting so she writes down the time and what she was doing and records it that way.
Great ep!! I would love a deeper dive into the Golden Hours! Mine are not so golden 🙂
@Molly – I’m not sure they’re golden for anyone with little kids! Hence the desire for a re-think… 🙂
I just wanted to share my support for utilizing kids’ activity times for personal time. During dance, piano or gymnastics classes I’ve read for leisure, or done school work or real work – I even plan that time into my week (those 1.5 gymnastics classes are long!). I do the same for indoor soccer practice. For outdoor soccer practice, I build in a weekly walk. I’ve scheduled catch-up calls with friends during these times (I just stay in the car). I used to dread gymnastics class, but having a plan for something I can do that’s not just scrolling has made it so much better!
My favorite email hack is to “schedule send” emails that don’t need to be responded to immediately for 8am the following day. This way I get to enjoy inbox zero for longer, and don’t create the expectation of immediately responding.