Time Management: How’m I Doing?

Back in January, when I started my new time management regime, I promised you an update at the end of February.

The goals, you may recall:
* 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)

I’ve fine-tuned it a bit since then. I started tracking a few new things: how much time I spend on reaching out to reporters who might interview me, and meeting planners who might hire me to speak. I’m also tracking how much time I actually spend being interviewed, and also a category of “mitigations”: reasons why on a particular day, my goals are unrealistic because I’m out of the office for several hours.

For instance, if it’s a day I have to drive my mother to one of her medical appointments in New Haven, that’s three hours of driving and up to two hours of sitting there, and there’s no way I’m going to make all my goals for that day. But if I see that I was out of the office for four or five hours, I don’t expect the impossible from myself.

On the days where I am around, I sometimes skew pretty far. But by keeping track, I can adjust on a different day. For instance, last week, I had two days in a row where I really focused on some urgent client projects. My goal is two hours per day. Last Wednesday, I did almost three–but then Thursday, when those deadlines had passed, I only did about half an hour for clients, and I did more on some other things.

Where I have utterly failed to adjust is e-mail. Keeping e-mail down to two hours a day is an admirable goal, and has caused me to streamline my inbox a lot. I think I’ve unsubbed from at least 60 newsletters since the first of the year.I’ve had exactly two days where I spent less than the quota, and entirely too many where e-mail has consumed three or four hours.

Yes, I could probably find another 20 publications to unsub from, but ultimately, in order to grow my business, I need to have someone else processing the routine e-mail. And because I’m tracking this, I’m able to quantify what had been a gut feeling (e-mail is taking too much time) and plan some ways of moving forward.

At the same time, once I started tracking it, I was able to bring social media down to something much more reasonable, and still have a good presence. Desiring to keep it to no more than 30 minutes a day has made me much more efficient. Yet my Twitter stream is still very active, I’m participating actively on a few LinkedIn groups, and I show up on Facebook enough to matter (usually feeding in from Twitter).

Yesterday was a day with no mitigations. Here’s what I did:
Client work: 99 minutes (a little under)
My personal work: 73 minutes
E-mail: 178 minutes (a hair under 3 hours)
Social media: 20 minutes (right on target)
Paying bills: 90 minutes (our once or twice a month big effort, an hour over the preferred average, but making up for many days where there was little or nothing)
Professional reading: 15 minutes (I’ll do some extra today, as there’s a book review I need to move forward)
Exercise: 35 minutes (would have been longer, but it was too icy to take much of a dog walk, and at night I was literally falling asleep on the exercise bike and had to stop early; thanks to the dog, I’ve managed to stay on track most days)
I spent only 20 minutes on tidying the office yesterday, but it is emerging from the chaos and feeling a bit less urgent, thanks to putting it on the daily schedule (though I have some goals for what happens when I’m all dug out—like going through my filing cabinets).
I spent 25 minutes querying reporters and meeting planners yesterday, something for which I haven’t set a goal but have been tracking as of February 15 (it depends entirely on who is looking for what kinds of sources and speakers)—it’s ranged from 20 to 65 minutes per day: sorting and responding to reporters looking for sources on HARO and its competitors, checking out and responding to speaking leads from Google alerts.

This whole thing is not an exact science. Sometimes I forget to start or stop a tracking category (or I think I’ve hit the button and it doesn’t register), sometimes I get interrupted by a phone call and let a few minutes chip into the category, and of course, sometimes one activity leads right into another, such as responding to e-mails that bring me to social media. But it’s a good approximation of how I’m spending my time. I don’t beat myself up when I’m off-goal, but I do try to compensate for it in other ways.

It’s also not perfect in that just because I’m spending a block of time on something doesn’t mean I’m experiencing high productivity. Yesterday, for instance, a full hour of my client time was chewed up researching something that should have been very easy to find. Sometimes, I’m not hugely efficient with a task even if I’m clocking it. But other times, I can power up and do a 1000-word article in 30 or 40 minutes (this one. 957 words, took 43 minutes), write a client project, and go go go.

On the whole, I’ve had a very productive and focused two months, and I’d call the experiment a big success. One that will continue until I have a reason to stop.