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[Stephen Smith]

One of the most frequently asked questions has to do with how to best manage time. The answer is simple: Do you know what you are spending your time on?
If you don't know, how can you manage it? This is my suggestion - Create a time log, a blank piece of paper divided into three columns: Time, Activity, and Interruption. Carry this paper with you for an entire day, recording your actions and activities, according to these instructions:

1. Every time you take on a new activity, make an entry on the Time Log. You may feel foolish. It will interrupt your work. Do it anyway and do it for the entire day. Pick a happy medium in defining what constitutes a new activity. (Don’t stop to note every pen stroke, but don’t have only large blocks of time entered as a single activity.)

2. Under “time,” enter the time you start the new activity, to the minute. Under “activity,” enter a brief description of what you’re doing. Under “interruption,” explain why the activity felt like an interruption of your time, if it did. This last column is totally subjective.

Tracking your day like this will allow you to see exactly what it is that you have been doing, so be honest and disciplined about it. You may be surprised at how different it is from what you think that you have been doing. It also allows you to track the types of interruptions that you experience, and when.

The next step is to analyze that time log. Look over your actions and activities for the day with a hi-lighter in your hand. Hi-light the entries that you consider to be “important”, and make a list of them on a second sheet of paper. Then make a list of the “unimportant” or “interruption” entries. Staple these together and file them in your Tickler for comparison four weeks from now. You may want to write the “interruptions” on a 3″x5″ card and keep it in your organizer so that you can be reminded of what activities you are working on eliminating.

[Jamie Phelps]

To put the electronic activities on automonitor, you can use something like Slife.

[Brad Blackman]

This reminds me of something I was thinking about on my drive to work this morning. A few years ago uber-designer Stefan Sagmeister took a year-long sabbatical, a year off from clients, so he could explore design. After a couple of weeks he found he was just doing chores all the time, so he wound up devising something that looked a lot like a college class schedule, where he'd spend a few hours MWF experimenting with Photoshop, a few hours in art galleries on Thursday afternoons, a few hours wandering the streets of NYC getting inspired, a few hours of free-association thinking on Tuesday mornings.

[austin]

This sort of fits into this thread I guess, so I'm going to share a way I keep track of interruptions. 

For the past few months I've pretty much been following the getting sh-t done organization scheme.  However, I have many days where I simply do not check a single item off my list.  Why?  Interruptions.  It could be big things on fire which do require me to be interrupted like down servers or borked routers.  Or it could be someone who works for me getting stuck and needing help.  Or my boss or another manager pulling me into some unplanned situation for help.  And the normal uninvited guests stopping by my desk asking for help or whatever.

What I've started doing is keeping a pad of those small yellow post-its handy.  Whenever I'm interrupted I grab one and write the time down.  When things settle back down where I can start working on my normally scheduled day I write the end time down and a short note on what happened.  This gets stuck in my GSD notebook on today's page.

At the end of the week or whenever I'm doing a weekly review I tally up by day time lost to interruptions.  (Today for example is running near 3 hours)

It has been helpful in that I've been able to use this evidence to schedule some "co-working" days over the next few weeks to get a big project over a hump.  I'll be in a corner of a local coffee shop coding a way those days.

[Matt Wood]

I hadn't seen GSD before.  That's funny because it's basically what I came up with before I jumped back on the OmniFocus horse.  I just never had a name for it. Something about just having all your stuff in one notebook certainly helps get shit done.

[Patrick Rhone]

GSD is very similar to my system as well (which I think I may have mentioned in another thread). Funny how all of us has "fallen back" on that kind of simplicity.

[austin]

For sure.  I think I've tried just about every online/electronic system out there.  But they just never stick.  I still use Evernote as a big reference repository, but my day-to-day "what the hell do I need to be doing list" is in my paper notebook.

[James Mallinson]

I've never really got into tracking your time, certainly not to the degree of having a time tracker. When I needed to save the odd minute here and there to help get things done, it was because I had too much going on. I've applied a 80/20 perspective to my workload and now time isn't really an issue.

[technotheory]

I'll second Jamie's recommendation for Slife--letting your software track your time when you're on a computer produces some surprising results.  http://www.rescuetime.com and http://www.timesnapper.com are also pretty awesome (the former has intense reporting and lets you compare to your office-mates, the latter is great for actual visuals of your activity, but it's PC only).  I use them both and I must say that the picture they've painted of my habits is not something I would have expected.

[fwade]

This is a pretty good practice, and one that I think could be used to make a case for getting one's own office with a door, voicemail, etc. -- anything in order to create the kind of quiet zone required to get work done.

I read a study back in the early 1990's that found that the number one predictor of software programmer productivity was the size of their office, which wasn't the true cause... it turned out that the larger the office, the more likely they were to have a door. Having a door meant that they could do the deep thinking required to program well.  In other words, they could lock out their interruptions.

I think most companies are still giving the bigger offices to the non-programmers, however!!   

I think having hard evidence is critical when one needs to convince one's boss that "I can't work on your latest brain-fart right now..." 

For the past few months I've pretty much been following the getting sh-t done organization scheme.  However, I have many days where I simply do not check a single item off my list.  Why?  Interruptions.  It could be big things on fire which do require me to be interrupted like down servers or borked routers.  Or it could be someone who works for me getting stuck and needing help.  Or my boss or another manager pulling me into some unplanned situation for help.  And the normal uninvited guests stopping by my desk asking for help or whatever.

What I've started doing is keeping a pad of those small yellow post-its handy.  Whenever I'm interrupted I grab one and write the time down.  When things settle back down where I can start working on my normally scheduled day I write the end time down and a short note on what happened.  This gets stuck in my GSD notebook on today's page.

At the end of the week or whenever I'm doing a weekly review I tally up by day time lost to interruptions.  (Today for example is running near 3 hours)

It has been helpful in that I've been able to use this evidence to schedule some "co-working" days over the next few weeks to get a big project over a hump.  I'll be in a corner of a local coffee shop coding a way those days.

[Stephen Smith]

Thanks for the great comments folks, I am averse to using a time-tracking app, most likely because I do not want to know how much time I spend surfing.
Now that I am a full-time web-jock again, I am rapidly getting back into my time-blocked routine (like the one mentioned by Brad about Sagmeister).
I have also found my little capture-notebook to be invaluable while I was "off the wagon", and for getting myself back on track.

[Flominator]

Under “interruption,” explain why the activity felt like an interruption of your time, if it did. This last column is totally subjective.

What exactly do you mean by that? Can you maybe give some examples? Thanks in advance

[Stephen Smith]

In the time tracker that I use there is a column for identifying if the activity was an interruption, rather than simply switching to a new task. For instance I might write down that I started working on a blog post at 8:30, then needed a link or reference, and while searching got distracted by another link and wound up spending 10 minutes exploring a different site - unrelated to the research. That would classify as an interruption.

Likewise, it the phone rang at 8:40, and I spent 10 minutes on the phone, that would count as an interruption.