How to Find Out Where Your Time Goes

To find out where your time goes, record it as it happens, or soon after, instead of estimating it. When people are asked how many hours they spend on something, they have to recall and add up many separate episodes in a few seconds, and the answers drift from what they actually did. Researchers measure time use with time diaries, a sequential account of a day that has to add up to 24 hours, and a timer or a log you keep yourself works on the same principle.

Why Estimates Mislead

The best-studied case is paid work. In a 2011 Monthly Labor Review article, Robinson and colleagues compared people’s answers to “how many hours do you work?” with their time diaries in the American Time Use Survey and a Belgian survey. Estimated hours came to over 39 a week on average, against closer to 36 in the diaries, an overestimate of roughly 5 to 12%, and the gap grew with the hours people claimed: those estimating 50 to 80 hours a week were furthest from their diaries. For housework the gap was almost double.

The size of that gap is disputed. In a 2014 reply in the same journal, Frazis and Stewart of the Bureau of Labor Statistics argued that the analysis had problems and that any bias in the government’s estimates of hours worked is small. What both sides accept is the method: a diary of what you did, in order, is the more reliable record, because it doesn’t ask you to do the arithmetic from memory.

Ways to Record It

• A timer. Start it when you begin something, such as writing or studying, and stop it when you finish. It’s the most exact, and the easiest to forget.
• A diary at the end of the day. Reconstruct the day episode by episode, in order. Kahneman and colleagues’ Day Reconstruction Method asks people to do this for the day before, with steps designed to reduce recall bias, and found its results closely matched those of sampling people’s experiences in the moment.
• Your calendar. It shows what was scheduled, which is useful for meetings and appointments, but not what you did in between, or whether a meeting ran short.
• Automatic records. Sleep from a wearable and time at home or at work from your location history fill in large blocks of the day without any effort.

What to Do With It

• Look before you judge. A week or two of records shows the shape of your days, including the weekly ones, before you decide what to change.
• Pick one thing to change. Set a target over a window of days, such as a number of hours of focused work in any 7 days, rather than a fixed daily quota that one busy day breaks.
• Keep the categories few. A handful you’ll actually use beats a detailed scheme you’ll abandon.

Following It in Kaizora

The timer in the header records what you’re doing as Tracked Time, with its title, kept apart from exercise. Calendar files bring each timed event, repeating ones expanded, as Calendar Event Time. Activity’s Time page puts them beside your hours asleep, in each kind of activity, and at home and at work, from your sleep and location history, so most of a day is recorded without a timer. Any of them can be a habit, such as at least a number of hours of tracked time in any 7 days. Breaking tracked time down by project or calendar is coming. See Track Time With the Timer.

The Short Version

• Estimates of your own hours drift; records of what you did, in order, don’t.
• A timer is exact; a diary at day’s end is the next best thing; a calendar shows only what was planned.
• Look at a week or two before setting a target, and set it over a rolling window of days.

Sources

• Robinson JP, Martin S, Glorieux I, Minnen J, “The overestimated workweek revisited,” Monthly Labor Review 134, no. 6 (2011): 43–53.
• Frazis H, Stewart JC, “Is the workweek really overestimated?” Monthly Labor Review (2014).
• Kahneman D et al., “A survey method for characterizing daily life experience: the day reconstruction method,” Science 306, no. 5702 (2004): 1776–1780. doi:10.1126/science.1103572