Welcome to anyone doing the September Reset! We have at least 1500+ people tracking time this week, and then learning some of my favorite time management strategies. If you didn’t sign up for the emails, don’t worry — you can still follow along here as I talk about a lot of the same topics.
For the first week (Sept 8-14) I’m encouraging people to try tracking their time. I have been tracking my time in half hour blocks for over 10 years now. Don’t worry, no one else needs to do that! But I do think it’s helpful to track for a week, just to get a real sense of where the time really goes. Without tracking, very few people have an accurate sense of how they spend all 168 hours of the week. For starters, most people don’t know there are 168 hours in a week! So there’s that.
Especially during times of transitions, knowing where the time goes can help us make better choices. We can see if certain things are taking more time than we thought, or perhaps we’re spending less time on other things than we might have imagined.
I am definitely still figuring out my new school year schedule. Now that the 10-year-old is going in the middle school run, I really feel like I need to be up and present during the 30 minutes while the two middle schoolers are getting ready. This means I need to shower prior to that, which means a wake-up of 6:40 on mornings my husband drives them, and 6:20 on bus mornings. Given that the kindergartner’s school doesn’t start until 9:10, this makes for some long mornings, particularly on the mornings I am driving him (our nanny is currently on vacation, so that’s been a lot of mornings, though that will eventually settle at 2 per week). Once he’s ready I’m generally OK with him watching videos which means I can get some work done, though nothing intense, as I’m likely to be interrupted. Let’s just say some mess of some variety winds up happening!
I know that evenings will also be something I’d like to pay attention to with this new routine. With lots of kids, there’s lots of stuff in the evenings. Plus I’m currently singing in two choirs. They don’t both meet every week, but a lot of weeks they will. I’m also trying to improve how I spend low energy time later at night. I do better when I have a book or a puzzle going.
What are you hoping to find out this week? I’d love to hear about it, or any observations you have about time tracking in general.
PS. Need a time log? You can grab a copy at this link — scroll down to step 2 to see the options. If you decide to use the Google sheets version, please follow the instructions to save your own copy!