Happy Sunday everyone! The 2025 Time Tracking Challenge officially starts at 5 a.m. Monday morning. I have a full morning tomorrow that involves driving to a speech, so I am posting this welcome thread now instead of then. I’ll post my full Monday log in the afternoon or evening.
Longtime readers know I have been tracking my time since April 2015. No one needs to do that. BUT I do think it is helpful to track a week here and there. If you’ve never tracked time before, now would be a great time to do it. If you have, maybe this week is a good time for a tune-up. Or maybe it isn’t — but some week in the near future is. I’d love to have you try it whenever!
You can sign up for motivational emails from me in the box on my homepage (LauraVanderkam.com). You can download a time tracking spreadsheet here. If you’e never tracked time before, it can be a little challenging to describe time (which often feels amorphous) in words. But it doesn’t have to be perfect. With a little practice, you’ll get it.
Thanks for joining! I’ll be back later on Monday to check in. I hope you have a wonderful rest of the weekend.
I always love the time tracking challenge! I’ve been tracking my time since the 2020 lockdowns and have found it extremely useful. So, thank you Laura!
I do have two questions: what do you normally do if you change activity part-way through one of the half-hour slots? If it’s just five minutes over, I just ignore it, but if I (for example) go for a run at ten past the hour and arrive back home at quarter to the next hour, I normally put it in both slots (along with the other activities that happened before and after, respectively), which means the logs can get messy quickly! Also, if something happens in a slot that only takes a few minutes but changes your day completely (say, a call from a friend with major news), do you write it down?
A tip for anyone who’s new to this: if you’re out-and-about a lot, the iPhone app Arc Timeline (https://www.bigpaua.com/arcapp/) automatically tracks when and where you are, which makes it much easier to reconstruct your day – no more need to keep a mental log of what time you moved from place to place!