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Improve my health and wellbeing 🧘

We’ve all felt the impact of the pandemic on our work lives recently and it’s no wonder that mindfulness and talking therapies are booming in popularity. But this of course treats the symptoms, not the cause. Here’s how you can set Timeular up to give you early indications of stress, burnout or frustration and give you the chance to do something about it quickly.

1) Select activities

When it comes to wellbeing, we’re more interested in the quality of activities – how they make you feel – and secondarily what they are.

We recommend that rather than assigning task groups as activities, you instead assign feelings or labels as activities e.g.

  • Energizing→Draining
  • Exciting 😄→Boring 🥱
  • or some stress indicator that makes sense to you

These could be binary values or on a spectrum (e.g. Very energizing, Quite energizing…). Whatever comes naturally to you. You can then use tags to add the specific activity that is causing this emotion (e.g. #meeting).

This is a better approach where there’s variability with how tasks make you feel. A ‘Meeting’ activity may make you feel amazing if you’ve closed the biggest deal of your life, or crushing if it’s a costly customer complaining.

Remember – everything tracked in your default Private Space (or any space that no one else is a member of) is completely private and no-one can see those entries but you.

2) Assign colors

Next assign a color to each activity, where each color is a shade from red→green, a traffic light system of how each activity makes you feel.

Or be more binary about it – your favorite color for everything good and your least favorite for the baddies.

3) Make time to check in with yourself and make changes

At the end of each day or week, reflect on where you’ve put your time vs where you’d like to realistically be putting your time.

Use color to guide you on how you’ve felt.

Then deep-dive to understand the triggers or patterns emerging that are causing negative emotion.

How long should I track for? 🤔

Short answer – for as long as it’s needed to help you feel better about where you’re putting your time.

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.