Yesterday I wrote about tracking time spent producing versus consuming, and found that my first-pass form wasn’t so easy to use. Primarily, I found filling in the bubbles tedious, and I wanted a little more space to take notes. My schedule is also really wacky, so I need to track all 24 hours. I also found it remarkably difficult to draw a good smiley face.
Draft 02
Today’s draft, as part of the MONTH OF PRODUCING EVERY DAY, is a refinement of yesterday’s form to meet all the above. I just copied the data form yesterday into it by hand, and am still finding it a little cumbersome. I find that I want to keep pretty detailed notes as to WHAT I was doing, and there just isn’t enough space. This form is perhaps a good design for a summary report, but I’m finding it difficult to use for daily tracking. I am going to just track the time spent MAKING, primarily, without details, until I figure out where this is going.
If you want to give it a shot:
- » Download PCTL01-US-BW.pdf – Today’s form
To recap: this form is designed to help me figure out how much time I spend producing versus consuming. My theory is that if I’m not producing, I’m not going to be happy in the long run because I am not moving forward. I’m curious to see how much time I actually spend consuming other people’s creative work versus doing my own original stuff, and how I feel about it on a given day. It’s not intended for detailed time tracking.
2 Comments
HI David, Good to see you thinking about a hard copy/in-your-face paper version. I know there are many digital/software versions that have the ability to track what you do on your computer but I believe over the past 14 years with digital versions of everything popping up now (like paperless billing, software that tracks and records your time on websites, etc. digital and cloud storage) with this seemingly limitless cloud world we now are seeing more of out of sight, out of mind taking over.
You do not really pay any attention to changes in your billing statements that are sent to you via email as that would take more of your precious time to read as well as actually reading software end user license agreements.
For some reason the way the brain processes info via computer, smartphone and now tablet I guess a survival mechanism that the brain has is to approach the content in a way to get through as quickly as possible and missing the important details that get forgotten.
Your paper version forces the user to stop and take time out to write down and take notes and then look at this sheet at the end of the day, week, month and may be more effective now that we have a physical copy and must notate it so we are more aware of these distractions, etc.
I will try this as I still use a similar method to keep track of my daily spending budget by writing down and saving every receipt on all that I have spent that day.
Thanks for the comment, mj! I like your observation about so much data being “out of sight, out of mind”. I’d like to get the paper lo refined to the point where it can produce a useful insight about the day as a byproduct of the mindfulness you talk about!
I just had an idea: maybe what I really should do is redefine all the productivity tools around a core “task model” for making things. That would be hot!