Austen has seven more ways that we can use the principles of time tracking to elevate our routines.

Energy cycles

Look at when your energy dips and how it aligns with meals, sleep and exercise. This can help you to design your day based on optimising your energy.

Focus times

Notice when you are most focused and productive and ringfence those hours for deep work. Do you work better first thing in the morning? It might make more sense to start work at 7am rather than 9am, and having data to confirm that will make having a conversation about flexible working hours easier with your boss.

Work out urgent versus important tasks

Use the ‘Eisenhower matrix’ to evaluate how well your time is spent on tasks. Divide tasks into four quadrants: urgent and important, urgent but not important, important but not urgent, and not urgent and not important. This time management method can help to define priorities and identify tasks to delegate or delete.

Investigate your procrastination habits

Whether it’s scrolling social media, going down research rabbit holes on Wikipedia, staring into space or watching TV, we all have our go-to form of procrastination. And while that’s not a bad thing (everyone needs a bit of brain space), we need to be in control of those habits. Identifying when these happen and what triggers them can help us find ways to reduce them.

Identify your time thieves

When do you tend to be interrupted? When are you most at risk of unproductive task switching, unnecessary notifications or purposeless meetings that break up your flow? Research from UC Irvine found that it takes, on average, around 25 minutes to recover from an interruption and to become productive again. Knowing when they’re likely to occur means that you plan your deeper work around those moments.

From curing brain fog to understanding low self-esteem: meet the extreme time trackers whose spreadsheets are helping them gain a deeper insight into their own psychology