do a life audit

It’s now becoming a habit to track my time on things. Occasionally I lose track for awhile and have to estimate, but I’m usually within fifteen minutes. I have gathered some valuable data. Time is even more precious than money. We should not want to waste a single minute of it. Time can be thrown away in a heartbeat. I am determined to not let that happen. I am more in control of my time now than I have ever been.

I’ve now been doing this again for 29 days. It’s helping me figure out how much time I am spending in important areas such as garden, piano, service and my business. I also have a program called top 20, which has expanded a bit. I keep track of more than 20 things. For high leverage areas such as garden, piano and my business I get one point for each 10 minutes on my top 20. For service I get one point for each 20 minutes. I would give service more credit, but it is easy to do service day in and day out and not take time for the other important things. So it has a little lower priority. But I still want to do some service.

I have now been keeping a life audit solidly for 21 days. The author of Life Audit says that you need about a month to get good data. Last week I printed out a pie chart of the previous week.

My breakdown of my time is was follows:
Business 19%
Rest 31%
Home 19%
Social 8%
Study 10%
Music 3%
Shopping 1%
Service 1%
Church 2%
Exercise 6%
Service 1%

I have data showing sub-categories of the above things but I have not made pie charts for it. I’ll have to see what all of this looks like by the end of the month.

I restarted my life audit as well as my activity log. I was able to categorize all of my activities in a tree structure, so that I can look at categories of activities to see how much time I am spending on them. One thing I’m keeping a careful watch on is how much time I’m putting into my new business.

I’ve done this now for 31 days which is a long enough period of time to get some valuable data. Unfortunately I will have to take a break because my computer needs servicing.

I’ve now done this for 19 consecutive days. I plan to keep doing it.

I’ve been doing my audit solid for 5 days now. I’m planning to do it many more days into the future. Soon I should have a very good idea of what I’m doing with my time. I realize that measuring something changes that measurement, but in this case it is changing it for the better.

Tomorrow I’m going to start my life audit again. I want to see where my time is going again and become more disciplined about what I do with it.

I’ve chosen the Lifeform program (www.lifeform.com) to do this. It’s a food diary that can be converted to a life audit system. I enter each category as a food and track it a minute per gram. I can do graphs to see how much time I’m spending in each category. With recipes I can have categories and sub-categories. I can track things down to the minute.

I did all of this awhile ago and got some good data. I want to do it again.