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Achieve more and make more of an impact with my time 🎯

A lot of what making more of an impact with our time comes down to is this simple formula – spending more quality time on what matters. Let’s unpack this a moment:

“more quality time” means not only increasing how much time but the quality of the time too. Spending more time at the end of the day when you’re thinking about dinner and starting to get tired isn’t going to do you any favors. Allocating discrete, distraction-free focused time when you’re most energized certainly will.

“on what matters” implies prioritization. In order to get to this point you’ll need to know specifically what will bring you closer to your goal.

Here’s how to set the formula up in Timeular 👇

1) Identify what you’d like to achieve

You’ve probably got something in mind already but if not, have a good think about what you’re aiming for.

We’ll use a hypothetical example – “Spend 5 hours per week coding my private project”.

2) Select what to track (what matters)

Ask yourself what it is you’d correlate with making more of an impact. This is going to dictate what you track. If success is spending more time on a specific activity like Coding (and all Coding activities are impact-oriented), then setting these tasks as activities is a good.

If there’s variability in the work – paid freelance Coding is not going to bring me closer the goal (though it’ll pay the bills 🙂), nor will contributing to an open source project but Coding on the private project will – then consider tracking something else.

It could just be “Private Project” and “Everything else”, or you could set one generic activity if you’re changing goals frequently, e.g. “Focus time”.

Don’t forget to add your favorite color to the activity to make the association stronger and give you a good dopamine hit when you start tracking it. Go ahead and add emojis too 😃 🙌 🦄

3) Set your Goal in the app based on the activities (how much quality time?)

Set a time-based goal in the app to reflect what you’re wanting to achieve (to answer the question ‘how much quality time?’).

If your goal is more of a binary output like ‘Launch my private project to the public’ then consider chunking this down to weekly time-based goals that’ll move you closer to it.

Here’s how one of our users, John, did just this (some free tips from his coach, too!).

Hint: pin the goal to stay motivated while you go.

4) Start tracking (and course correct where needed)

Get going 🐯!

Start tracking and set weekly moments to check in on progress and make changes to course correct and improve your chances of hitting it 🙌

How long should I track for? 🤔

Short answer – for as long as it’s needed to be making the impact you wish to make.

It’s best to continue tracking until you meet your desired outcome and then pick the next outcome that makes sense for where you’re then at.

Our philosophy is that time tracking is much like staying fit – you may need a short bursts of high intensity exercise at times and at other times it’s a case of staying in shape with less intense but regular activity.

A lot of our users find a weekly cadence of 1) setting a tracking goal → 2) tracking it → 3) reviewing and identifying change → 1) setting a new goal (etc) to be a good rhythm.

So, look to the week ahead and then ask yourself the question again. Remember, it takes a few days to ingrain the habit of time tracking when you’re starting out.

Tips and final words of encouragement 🙌

  1. Start by figuring out what’s your most important time management problem that you’d like Timeular to help with (rather than just starting to track random activities).
  2. Don’t try to track every little thing, or be a hard-ass about stopping the clock when you go to the bathroom or get more coffee.
  3. It’s hard to track 100% of your time right away, start easy and track the big things first. Be easy on yourself if you missed little things.
  4. If you have a Timeular Tracker put it somewhere where you see it often – it’s a great physical reminder, e.g. below your monitor or next to your phone
  5. If you don’t have a Tracker put a Post-It or sticker near your monitor as a visual clue to track
  6. Adjust our reminders in the Settings > Reminders & Emails section, e.g. we have a start of day reminder, long time entries reminder aka. Pomodoro reminder, and many others that assist you in our daily workflows
  7. Get used using our CMD+E (Mac) or CTRL+E (Windows/Linux) Quicktrack shortcut to easily start and stop tracking out from any app
  8. Easily fill in gaps in your timesheet and edit wrong time entries with drag and drop functions

Need more help? Get in touch with us and we’ll be glad to help.

What do you want to achieve next?

Go back to Guide: get started with time tracking.