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💡 The Big Idea: When it comes to time, what doesn't get measured often gets wasted.

When it comes to effective time management, there are 2 important things to be aware of:

1. Did we have a solid plan for how we intend to spend our time?
2. How well were we able to stick to that plan?

The first objective is accomplished through a practice called time blocking, which we covered last week. This week, we’re going to dive into time tracking and show you that it’s not as complicated or scary as it sounds.

How Does Time Tracking Relate to PKM?

Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) is really all about how you handle all the information that flows into and out of your world. That information is the fundamental building block of everything that you do and the foundation of the PKM Stack:

You can get more out of your notes and ideas, though, when you approach this top-down and align it with your vision & values.

But once you get clear on what you want to do (the Actions level of the PKM Stack), you need systems to help you consistently take action on the things that matter.

That’s where time blocking (creating the plan) and time tracking (gauging how well you were able to follow it) come in.

As I mentioned last week, these are bookends for making the most of your limited time. And if you don’t do both, you’re missing out on the opportunity to improve your systems over time because you’re not getting the feedback loops you need to make the necessary adjustments.

Why You Should Track Your Time

Because how we think we spend our time often varies greatly from how we actually spend our time.

If you don’t believe me, try this:

Think about what your biggest time-wasting activity is on your smartphone. We all have one, whether it’s social media, Netflix, email, or something else. Try to estimate how much time you spent this week on that activity.

Next, go to your screen time setting on your phone:

• On iOS, go to Settings → Screen Time and tap on See All App & Website Activity
• On Android, go to Settings → Digital Wellbeing and tap on Screen Time

How much time did you really spend? If this is the first time you’ve gone into these settings (and you’re anything like me), it’s probably significantly higher than you thought.

But that’s OK! Because now you have a baseline for how you are actually spending your time.

And now you make adjustments where necessary to help you keep your attention where you want it.

Time Tracking Doesn't Have to Be Hard

When most people think of time tracking, they think of carefully writing down how they spend every minute of their day. It's kind of like filling out an expense report for a work trip, only no one is making you and you're doing it to yourself.

That sounds miserable. This is not the kind of time tracking I'm talking about.

What we're after with time tracking is a general idea of how we're currently spending our time. This will allow us to make better time-blocked plans in the future, and we'll be able to tell our time where it should go instead of wondering where it all went.

How to Track Your Time

Conceptually, time tracking is easy: you simply track where you are spending your time.

In practice, it tends to be a little bit trickier. But it doesn’t have to be.

If you’re brand new to time tracking, I recommend you start with an automatic time tracker like Timing. Timing watches what you do on your computer and tracks your time for you. The Timing dashboard gives you an overview of where you spent your time, showing you how productive you were, which apps you used, and even which sites you visited or documents you worked on. All without you having to start or stop a single timer.

It can even see which Obsidian notes you had active, which is great for me since there’s no telling what mode I might be in when in Obsidian (I could be planning, writing, reflecting, or a number of other things).

You can also set up rules to automatically track time to specific projects or modes that you set up in Timing. Simply hold the option key while you drag a time entry to a project, and all future matching time entries will automatically be classified as part of that project.

(If Timing isn’t an option for you, RescueTime is also good as an automatic time-tracking app that is available on many additional platforms.)

There is something to be said about manual time tracking, though. I personally love starting and stopping timers as a way to mode switch, and the app I recommend if you want to do the same is Timery. Timery integrates with Toggl, but provides a much better user interface. It also has great support for widgets and a bunch of automation hooks that you can use to start and stop timers using Shortcuts on Mac & iOS.

Regardless of the method you use, the first step is to get some data on how you are actually spending your time. Don’t worry about the specifics or whether the data is perfect. You just need something to start with.

Next, start looking for opportunities for improvement. For example, if you spent 20 hours last week on social media, try to tighten that up a little bit (assuming that’s now in line with your vision and your values for how you intend to spend your time. If it is, then good job 😉)

Even if you "waste" 19 hours the next week instead of 20, you’re moving in the right direction! The trends are more important than the numbers, especially when you’re starting out.

Keep striving for incremental improvements. Those 1% changes lead to significant gains if you stick with it. And with each round, you get a little bit better at making realistic plans and a little bit more intentional with how you spend your time.

— Mike

😎 Something Cool: Quick Select Plugin​

I love keyboard shortcuts. I even made a YouTube video specifically about keyboard shortcuts in Obsidian. And I prefer to keep my fingers on the keyboard whenever possible.

All that to say Quick Select is definitely my kind of plugin.

It’s pretty simple: it adds numbers to all of the options so that you can quickly open a file, execute a command, select a tag, or choose a suggestion from a list:

To choose the option, just hit the modifier key plus the number you want (on the Mac, it’s the Command key; on Windows/Linux, it’s Control).

Quick Select works in all Obsidian modal windows, including the Quick Switcher, the Command Palette (including all subsequent modal windows), Slash commands, Search, Tags, Aliases, and more. Anywhere there’s a modal window in Obsidian, you can select an option with a keyboard hotkey using Quick Select.

📚 Book Notes: Busy by Tony Crabbe

If we aren’t intentional about how we spend our time, we’ll likely feel “busy.” But as Busy by Tony Crabbe points out, being busy is actually a choice. We may be busy because it’s easier, it’s what everyone else is doing, or we’re trying to avoid something. But things won’t improve until we decide to step off the treadmill and make choices about what’s really important to us.

This book surprised me. I didn’t really think I’d like it that much, but I really enjoyed it. There’s some great insight here for understanding what fuels our addiction to busyness and advice for stepping off the treadmill and walking our own path.

​Click here if you want to download my mind map notes from this book.

— Mike

P.S. I just released an epic video on my task management system in Obsidian. This one just about killed me 😂 It's almost 30 minutes long and includes a full rundown of my Task Dashboard. I've been working on it for over a month, and I'm really happy with how it turned out. Click here to check it out.