Are You Using Your Time Poorly?

One of the great outcomes we get from measuring any type of activity is that we get to see where there may be some deficiencies. It doesn't matter what it is, if it's worth doing, it's worth measuring.

If you measure then you can make smart decisions based on the data instead of just a feeling.

Don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with gut-feelings but if you're trying to improve your productivity and use your time better, you must measure it and find where you're using your time poorly.

It's like anything else, let me give you a couple examples.

A Food Example

For example, if you're trying to eat better and exercise more, you should track your food intake so that you know how many calories you're taking in, and you should track your physical activity to estimate how many calories you've burned.

If you don't measure your food intake with an app like My Fitness Pal, it's easy to dismiss a quick snack as being suitable for your diet because it was just a "quick bite" but you don't realize that a quick snack can be up to a quarter of your total daily calorie allowance.

A Website Example

If you want to improve traffic on your website, you should track it with a traffic analytics software like Google Analytics.

Using analytics to review your traffic will show you what are your most trafficked pages, it may also show you where people tend to abandon your website and other things that will let you find where you can make improvements to your website.

But what about your time?

But how about your time? Can you track your time and find out when you're using it poorly?

Why, yes you can!

The other day I was asking about your time and productivity, I asked: Are You in Control of Your Time and Productivity? and the post was about how to track your time spent and increase productivity.

So I wanted to highlight another feature of Time Doctor which I talked about in that blog post. The feature I'm going to show you today is pretty straightforward.

It helps you find out if you could manage your time better by guessing that you spent too much time on a time-wasting website. Like Facebook, Youtube, and others.

By the way, you can check out TimeDoctor here. It may be one of the best apps you get to use this year.

Take a look at this screenshot:

But Facebook is Business too!

Now, I happen to run part of my business from Facebook so time on Facebook may very well be business time for me.

But this was flagged as potential poor time use because I wasn't tracking any other time in Time Doctor so it assumed I was just wasting time.

Most employees and most people's work doesn't require that they check Facebook, Youtube, or other sites that could be a distraction. The exception, of course, granted for digital marketers, CEOs, and social media managers.

Identifying the potentially poor use of time can be useful if you have employees or virtual assistants whom you pay by the hour. You can determine when they're supposed to be working and all they have to do is check in and keep track of which tasks they're working on.

The desktop and mobile app make it so you or your employees can easily track their tasks and time no matter where they are.

In Conclusion

I already mentioned TimeDoctor before, I love it. This is another feature I love about the software. It tries to keep track of my productivity and reminds me if I've been spending time on websites that could be time wasters. See screenshot above for an example of a report of possible time spent poorly.

I use it for myself, and you should too. But if I had virtual assistants or employees, I would use Time Doctor as my timesheet software for the entire team. I love this feature and the screenshot feature --which I'll cover in another blog post.

If you want to check out Time Doctor, visit here to start a free trial. I really recommend it and can't speak more highly of it.