Have Less Stress And Get More Things Done By Writing Down Your Work Time

You might be required to write down your work time for your client or your employer. But even if you are not required, you should do so, as it will help you reduce your stress and be more productive.

In 2020 with the Coronavirus pandemic many people all over the world started to work from home. Without being able to track office time, many employers started requesting their employees to write down their work time.

Also, people are increasingly working on a contractor basis where their employer becomes a client who is being charged on the hours of work time. So you might already be required to write down your work time.

If you are not required to do so, you might think that writing down your work time is wasteful. However, we will show you here that writing down work time can be done without wasting time and has many benefits such as decreasing your stress and increasing your productivity.

1. Arguments Against Writing Down Your Work Time

There are at least three common arguments against writing down your work time:

● Waste of time

● Too much control of employees

● Focus on work results over work time

Let’s explore each of these arguments.

1.1. Waste of time

You might think that writing down your work time is a waste of time. However, writing down your time doesn’t have to take much time. In fact, it should take only a few seconds. Also, even if you are not estimating work time explicitly, you are already doing it implicitly. For example, we all estimate the amount of work we have to do when we plan our weekly tasks or our daily task list, which means that we implicitly estimate the time the work takes.

1.2. Too much control of employees

You might initially feel uncomfortable writing down the exact time for your work tasks, because you think your employer should trust you. However, writing down the tasks enables trust in the relationship with your employer. This is especially true if you are working from home or working while travelling the world as a digital nomad.

1.3. Focus on work results over work time

You might say that work time does not matter, only work results matter. While this is true, for many kinds of work the results are not tangible or take a long time to appear.

Also, the end results can depend on many other circumstances besides the work effort.

For these reasons, although the most important consideration is the work result, it also makes sense to measure work time.

2. Benefits of Writing Down Time

We have seen that there are no real disadvantages to writing down work time. So it makes sense to write down time if there are significant benefits. These benefits we list below.

2.1. Working in cycles

Working in cycles has been popularized by the Pomodoro method. In the Pomodoro method you work in work sprints of 30–60 minutes. The essential element of the Pomodoro cycles is that work has a clear start and end point. These points are best marked by setting a timer or by writing down a time estimate at the beginning of the work and then writing the actual time of work at the end of the cycle. So estimating and tracking time helps you work in cycles.

2.2. Distinguishing between net and gross work

When you track your work-time you will come to the realization that you are in fact doing far less work than what you thought you were. So you realize the difference between your gross amount of work and your net amount of work. The gross amount of work includes your total time in office and any activity broadly related to work. On the other hand the net amount of work only includes the time that you are really productive. So it doesn’t include commuting time, talking to colleagues, having a coffee break or taking a snack.

Once you realize the difference you can aim to decrease your gross work while simultaneously increasing your net work.

2.3. Recognizing time split between projects

You might be working on different projects and splitting your time between them. Tracking your time makes evident how you are splitting your time. This might already seem obvious. However, I found from my own experience that many times I overestimated the amount of time I spend on projects and I was frustrated that a certain project was not advancing faster. But when I checked my work time on the project and found that I was only contributing 5 hours per week, I immediately knew why the project was not advancing.

2.4. Time tracking in a team

The main benefit from time tracking comes when you are working in a team and the whole team is tracking the time. The time analytics of each team member are interesting for each person himself, but they are even more interesting on an aggregate level, as you can see how much time the whole team has worked together and compare it with the work progress made. Also, you can see how much each person has worked each day of the week and you can compare the work effort of the team members to each other.

3. How to Write Down Your Work Time

3.1. Write down the time when planning

Some people think about writing down time only for time tracking, meaning Some people write down their work time only for time tracking, after having done the work. While there are advantages to tracking the time, there are even bigger advantages for writing down the work time as a time estimate. So you should already write down the time when you are planning your work and then only adjust it later. This way you can combine the benefits of time planning with time tracking.

3.2. Correcting time when actually executing

Finally, it is important that you check after each finished task how much time it actually took you and to correct the estimate. In case you are only partially done with a task, write down how much time you expected to still be working on it and add the time you already worked to give you the total time estimate.

If you are writing down your work time as recommended above, you will soon see the benefits: less stress, more awareness of what is going on at your work, and more work completed.

3.3. Software to Make Self Time Tracking Easy

It is much easier to estimate and edit your work time with a software tool. However, most tools to track time are not friendly to use if you do manual time tracking.

Also, when I was looking myself for good tool for a kind of self tracking I could not find any tool with the following features:

• Permit to split large tasks into smaller tasks and subtasks.
• Let us easily adjust the work estimates and actual work time.
• Create visual analytics based on our past work and work planned for the future.

Since we could not find any good software tools we created our own tool called Workiamo.

Workiamo is a very simple tool that is ideal for anybody that wants to be less stressed and more productive. As you are reading this, we let you access it for lifetime for free! In order to do so, you have to register at www.workiamo.com by entering this code: ILOVEWORK.