I timed everything for 30 days

I decided to time every single task for 30 days. From brushing my teeth, to folding laundry, to eating breakfast, and doing my taxes. I'm timing every task down to the minute. And I'm doing it because I suck at time management. I've always been terrible at planning projects, and I perpetually miss deadlines. It's like clockwork. I have an idea, I put together a timeline, I give myself way more time than I think I need, and yet the deadline flies by. Didn't we do this yesterday? I want to explore why we're often so terrible at planning, how we can finally hit our deadlines, and why that might involve picking up a stopwatch. This video is brought to you by Squarespace. I'll talk more about why I think they're so great later on in the video. First things first, I need a stopwatch, but not one of these. I want to find an app that will help make this process more painless, and that can also give me weekly reports on how I'm spending my time. So I tried a dozen of the best-rated time management apps and found one called Toggle that would work perfectly for this experiment. So technically, this app is designed for work-related projects, but I found that it can work equally well for all of the tasks in my life. Before I start a task, I simply hit the little play button here. I add a project, or in my case, a task, and then I stop the timer when I'm done. The calendar view allows me to see all the tasks performed in a given day, and the last tab shows me a breakdown of exactly how I'm spending my time. So besides getting a clear picture of where all my time goes these days I'm also really interested to learn how long it takes me to make a single YouTube video This is something that you would think I would know by now after making videos for 20 years But I don't and I think it'll really help me plan projects in the future After a couple days of tracking, I started to put together a pretty good system. I thought that creating hundreds of unique tasks would be really confusing and time-consuming. So instead of separate tasks for reading, meditating, and watching TV, I created one category of tasks called personal. And I created other task categories including work, sleep, preparing and eating food, quality time with family, doing chores, weightlifting, playing baseball, hygiene, and of course, toilet. So right when you open up toggle, you'll see your most recent tasks. If I want to start a new one up again, all I have to do is press that little play button right there and the task gets started. Super simple. This is helping me save time tracking, but it's also giving me a more clear and useful view of how I spend my time. I don't really need to know how much time I spend flossing every month, which is definitely way more than zero minutes. Douglas Adams once said, I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by. From small projects to multi-billion dollar developments, so many of us have issues with deadlines that behavioral psychologists even have a name for it. It's called the planning fallacy. The planning fallacy is a cognitive bias first proposed by Nobel laureates Daniel Kahneman and Amos Traversky and refers to the tendency for individuals to underestimate the amount of time, costs, and risks associated with future actions and overestimate the benefits or rewards. Or put another way, we suck at setting deadlines. We might fall into the planning fallacy for a number of reasons. It could be that we're overly optimistic about how easy something will be for us. I've made lots of videos before, so this one will be a breeze. Or we fail to consider unexpected events. There's loud construction next door, making it impossible to film your video at home. Or we lack relevant information. Making a video about powerlifting is very different from making one about productivity. The list goes on. In order to overcome the planning fallacy, there are some things that you can do. One in particular is called reference class forecasting, which isn't nearly as complicated as it sounds. Basically, the next time that you go about setting a deadline or starting a project, don't go with your gut. Look at similar projects that you've completed in the past first. Analyze how long it typically takes you to complete a project like this and try to fully understand the challenges that you might encounter along the way. This approach helps to ground your predictions in real-world data and experiences. And that's exactly what brought me to timing every task. All right, so let me show you guys what one full week of tracking looks like. So this is a snapshot here of all of my tasks that I've timed. You can zoom in a little bit. You can see here, family, work, family, toilet, family. and so on. I did notice something interesting the moment that I started timing every task, and it's that I became much more aware of how I was spending my time. Let's just say that when you start a timer the moment you enter the bathroom, you're less likely to spend 20 minutes browsing Instagram. The very act of tracking was starting to change my behavior. It's the same reason habit trackers, calorie counters, and workout logs are so effective. They're habits that keep your other habits going. As extreme as it is to start and stop a timer all day long, it was helping me stay more accountable and bringing greater awareness to how I spend my time each day. But even so, the data was pretty embarrassing after my first week. So the one thing that really stands out to me one week in is the amount that I've been working. I logged 20 hours of work last week, which... is really bad. Honestly, I knew that I wasn't working a lot, but this is just like way worse than I possibly thought it could be. If I had a boss, I'd probably be fired by now. The truth is that I've been struggling to get motivated. I've been struggling with my role as a parent and a business owner and trying to balance everything. And so I haven't been doing as good of a job as I would have. hoped with my work and so i'm trying to get back on track that's why i'm timing every task to begin with and the good news is now i have this like baseline of 20 hours that hopefully i don't go below and i can see how can i build upon this how can i change my behavior in the coming weeks to improve the amount of time that i'm spending working Looking at the data, one area that I knew I could improve was task switching. I was doing it a lot. I'd work for a few minutes, then help out with Frankie. I'd get back to work, but then take a quick snack break. Then I'd help out with Frankie again. Eventually, I'd find my way back to work and have no clue where I left off. So I started locking myself in my office and committing myself to working for at least 30 minutes straight every time I started the timer. I knew from past experience this was a really good way to stay motivated and on track for short bursts of time. And usually you don't stop at 30 minutes. Once you get into a flow state, you keep working. This kind of tracking is incredibly tedious and it adds a layer of friction to everything that I do, but I'd be lying if I said it wasn't effective. I started to work more, my working hours were more focused, and I was more accountable to myself than I'd been over the past six months. But the biggest lessons were still to come as I put together all the data for the entire month. Since I'm timing everything this month, I thought, let's start the clock on my Squarespace sponsorship and see if I can fit it into 45 seconds, starting now. I'm wasting time. So 10 years ago, when I first started freelancing, I decided to build a website. And after a long search looking to different hosting platforms and backend solutions, I decided to go with Squarespace. And let me tell you, that was a really smart decision. Here's why. Their website builder is really easy to use and effortless to customize. You can select from a range of beautiful templates, add your branding, and publish your website in no time. You can easily add new content, pages, and blog posts. No need to stress out about confusing technical backend stuff. It's so intuitive, a baby could do it. Okay, maybe not a baby, but you get the idea. I'm running out of time. And you can buy domains and set up your G Suite email accounts directly through Squarespace. All these things mean that I can come up with an idea and publish it in no time, and I can update it whenever I want to. From blogs and online stores to marketing tools and analytics, Squarespace is the all-in-one platform to build your next brand or business. Go to squarespace.com for a free trial, and when you're ready to launch, go to squarespace.com slash mattdiavella to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. That's squarespace.com slash mattdiavella. And 45 seconds. Thanks to Squarespace for supporting my channel. If you also want to support my channel, then click the link in the description below the next time that you want to build a website. Thanks for considering. All right, so I timed every task for a month and I have my life represented in data and I've really learned a lot from it. Keep in mind that these numbers don't perfectly add up to a 24 hour day because I didn't do a perfect job of timing every task. If you're curious, I logged 687 hours, 22 minutes and 28 seconds over the course of the month, which means that there were around 33 hours unaccounted for. I'll let you guess in the comments what I was doing during this time. Alrighty, so over the past 30 days, I have dedicated 39% of my time or nine hours per night to sleep. I should say attempted sleep because this doesn't count the thousands of times that I woke up to rock my son back to sleep. But it does give you a clear picture of how much time on average I'm dedicated to sleeping each day. Next up was family time at 31%. That ended up being about... seven hours per day. This is really anything that I would qualify as quality time with Nat or Frankie. And when it comes to my business, this was the area that I was most interested in improving over the month. I spent 14% of my time working. That ends up being five hours and 13 minutes. per weekday. So I can definitely say that the adjustments I made and the added accountability of tracking my time made a really big difference over the past month. Of course, I was still disappointed that I wasn't hitting the 40 hours I wanted to, but then I realized why I'm working less. It's because I'm spending more time with my son and more time helping Nat around the house. I think when I first started to see my low numbers in terms of working hours, I thought like, oh man, I'm only working 20 hours a week. and now i'm starting to look at it like i'm only working 20 hours a week that's amazing like how cool is it that i've built this life where i can step away i know that it wouldn't be able to slow down as much as i am right now if i didn't work my ass off throughout my 20s and early 30s so i'm just so grateful for young matt for like hustling and working really hard because i really did set myself up for this moment right now where i can have a slower season of my life Let's quickly go through the rest of the tasks for the month. I spent 36 hours weightlifting. This has gone up quite a bit over the past couple months since I'm powerlifting now and I'm working on a video on the topic, but weightlifting in general has always been a non-negotiable for me. 18 hours of chores, nearly 18 hours of preparing and eating food. This is an area where I'm spending much less time lately because I'm subscribed to a boxed meal prep service. It's just one of the small ways that I'm trying to save time every day now with the additional responsibilities of being a parent. to 17 hours playing baseball, 18 hours of hygiene, six and a half hours of personal time, or just 1% of my life. This is another harsh reality of being a parent. You just have very little time to yourself. And finally, four hours on the toilet all month. For the record, I think my hygiene and toilet numbers are lower than reality and account for my imperfect tracking I mentioned earlier. Still, I think this is a really accurate summary of how my time gets divided up any given month these days. if you remember one of the big questions i had at the start of this experiment was how long does it take me to make a single youtube video and the one video that i tracked over the past month was about how much sleep i'm currently getting as a new dad and from start to finish it took me a total of 54 hours to make it that was nine hours writing 19 hours filming and 26 hours editing now this isn't going to perfectly help me plan every project in the future but it will help me get a better idea of how to set deadlines going forward and if i continue to track my projects and my videos in the months to come say if i track 25 of my videos i'll have a much more clear idea of the average to create any particular video and I can hopefully better plan my projects going forward and miss less deadlines. That's the hope at least. If you want to try this experiment for yourself, I have a few important takeaways that might help. Only track the important stuff. My experiment was needlessly extreme. It was fun for a short-term experiment, but the reality is that I only needed to track the things I wanted to learn about. If I were to do this again, I might just track my work tasks and personal tasks. Knowing that I spent four hours on the toilet all month isn't exactly useful information. Protect your creative time. The more that you switch tasks and allow for interruptions, the harder it will be to get into a flow state. This is really productivity 101. It's something that I already knew, but sometimes you need to relearn these lessons over and over again, especially when you have a significant change in your life, like becoming a parent. And finally, just because something is easy doesn't mean it will be quick. I've made hundreds of videos in my life. Making videos isn't really that difficult anymore, but that doesn't mean that I can make one in a day. It still takes time to sort through the messiness of writing, filming, and editing a video. No matter what your area of expertise, quality work can't be rushed.

Go to https://www.squarespace.com/mattdavella to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using code MATTDAVELLA  🙌


Sign up for my newsletter:  http://mattdavella.com/newsletter

🗣️ Things I mention in this video:
Toggle App: https://toggl.com/track/mobile-time-tracking-app/

Hi there 👋 If you're new to my videos my name is Matt D'Avella. I'm a documentary filmmaker, entrepreneur and YouTuber. I've made a couple documentaries for Netflix. I also teach courses on everything from filmmaking to habit change. If you like to nerd out about self-development as much as I do, you can subscribe for weekly videos.

🔗 LINKS
Enroll in my YouTube course:  https://slowgrowth.com/masteryoutube
Get my weekly newsletters:  http://slowgrowth.com/newsletter
Follow me on Instagram:  http://instagram.com/mattdavella
Follow me on Twitter:  http://twitter.com/mattdavella