One Week In: How’m I Doing?

When setting up my time goals as of the first of the year, I also committed to paying attention to whether they were realistic, and how close I was coming. I knew going in that I wasn’t going to be exactly on the mark, and that I wasn’t going to beat myself up for failure when the dominant trend was “this is so much better than you did last year.”

And I won’t be tracking on weeks I’m away. This is an at-home schedule.

So far, I’m actually fairly pleased.

My goals were:

• Work for paying clients: 2 hours (120 minutes)
• My own writing, research, and marketing: 1 hour (60 minutes)
• Processing e-mail: 2 hours (120 minutes)
• Participating in social media: 15-30 minutes
• Dealing with finances, bills, recordkeeping, etc.: 30 minutes
• Office and household organizing and cleaning: 30 minutes
• Professional reading: 1 hour (60 minutes)
• Physical exercise: 1 hour (60 minutes)

And my averages for Monday through Friday:

• Work for paying clients: 77 minutes (13 minutes below goal)
• My own writing, research, and marketing: 82 minutes) (22 above goal, this is good!)
• Processing e-mail: 158 minutes (Uh-oh! Still wrestling that demon!). That does not include the significant time I spend answering queries from reporters—which I’m trying to keep below an hour a day, but really depends on who’s looking for what
• Participating in social media: 25 minutes (right in the target zone, because I could measure and track and not let it over-consume my time)
• Dealing with finances, bills, recordkeeping, etc.: 45 minutes (and that will be disproportionate this week too, because I’m getting my taxes done Wednesday)
• Office and household organizing and cleaning: 33 minutes (pretty good, but more was on household than on office)
• Professional reading: 38 minutes (a bit low, 22 minutes under)
• Physical exercise: 63 minutes (that’s fine)

So what have I learned so far?

• There ARE enough hours of the day, although I understandably came up short the day I had three hours out of the house for meetings and errands (and that threw off the average for financial and organizing, both of which took a zero that day)
• E-mail is a monster. Even going well over my quota, and even exempting the time I spend answering queries from reporters  I ended the week with 300 more messages in my inbox than I’d started, and spent a bunch of untracked time yesterday fighting it back down below 1000. I get an average of 300 messages every weekday. Some of those take three seconds to scan and delete, some require 15 or 20 minutes to answer, and most are somewhere in between. I’ve always felt that 100 inbound messages a day is a reasonable number to deal with, and I’m now taking active steps to reach that goal. I’ve unsubbed from dozens of newsletters and LinkedIn groups, and will continue to reduce the flow. If I don’t get direct and significant value from nearly every issue, out it goes. I’m also thinking seriously about ways to outsource more of my mail.
• Finding the time to focus doesn’t necessarily mean productivity. Some of my writing shifts were terrific, with words just pouring into my keyboard. Other days were frustrating, spending 20 minutes in one case to track down just three contacts.
• Overall, this regime is a very good thing. It is forcing me to stay much more closely on track, I’m feeling very productive, and I’m getting more of my goals accomplished. And I’m working on ways to get more value out of the time I spend, so that’s a secondary goal for me.

I’ll report back next maybe at the end of February, where I’ll have had some time to really work with this and fine-tune it.