I remember the first time after my wife and I started dating that a mutual friend of ours became pregnant. I was the first one to find out until I relayed the message to her. “Oh, Amy's pregnant.” She then proceeded to ask me a series of questions. Oh, wow. When is she due? I don't know. What is she having? I don't know. How is she feeling? I don't know. Were they trying for a long time? I don't know. All I knew was that Amy was pregnant.
And so my wife later went out and found this information out for both of us. And that's important information. Right? Because if she's not feeling well, we'd like to know how we can help support her. We wanna know when she's due so that we can be there for her and get her a gift and kind of plan for the baby shower. We wanna know if she knows what she's having so that we can buy appropriate clothing or gifts or whatever, find out where they're registered, all of that important stuff to make you a more present and supportive friend.
So why am I telling you this? Because, my friends, if you are running a business, especially a solo business where your time is so important and you are not time tracking, it's kind of like knowing just the bare minimum. Oh, I completed a project today or this week or this month when you should really know how long did I spend on this? Where am I spending most of my time in my weeks? How can I look at this data and understand how I can better improve my business?
So in today's solo episode, I am going to tell you all about time tracking, Why you should do it, how you can do it, how I'm doing it, and I'm going to answer some questions from folks across social media. You can find all of the show notes over at [streamlined.fm/424].
And for the accelerated episode, the members-only episode, I will be digging into my time-tracking, talking a little bit more about how I'm spending my time, and whether or not some of the projects I'm working on are worth it, how I'm gonna fix it.
All right. So, that is that episode. As a reminder, the member episodes are about twice as long as the ad-supported ones. So if you enjoy this content, you wanna support a solo podcaster, and you want more content like this ad-free, you can sign up. The link will be on the show notes over at [streamlined.fm/424]. There should also be a link in your podcast player. But for now, let's get into the intro and then the episode.
Welcome to the Streamlined Solopreneur, a show for busy solopreneurs to help you improve your systems and processes so you can build a business while spending your time the way you want. I know you're busy, so let's get started.
All right. So let's dive into this.
First of all, what is time-tracking? Well, the simplest way to put it is that you are writing down, you are noting where you spend your time, approximately how much time you're spending on specific tasks. So, if you have worked for a company before, maybe they wanna know. Right? Because they need to figure out billable hours. And so maybe some, when I was in the web design world, we time-tracked. Right? We had to put into a system how long we were spending on each client project because we charged a flat fee, and we needed to understand if we were, like, blowing our budget on a certain project, where we spending our time on certain tasks so that we can better quote in the future. So you don't need a super complicated system. I'm gonna get into my system in a little bit. But maybe you just write down on a piece of paper, like, hey. 8-10 AM meetings. Right? Or, 9- :30 AM follow-ups and clear inbox. Right? Just something to give you a better idea of where you're spending your time.
So, I can see, I am looking at my time tracker right now, and I have tracked 5 and a half hours of work today, considering I am recording this close to 5 PM. I'm probably a little shy on what I would have liked to do. I probably missed something, or maybe I was just kinda, you know, fooling around and not working on what I should be working on. I don't log lunch. Right? So, I mean, we're in, like the 6-7 hours range anyway, but that's where I'm at for today. Pretty, pretty good, I guess. Right?
If I'm looking at the other days that I've time-tracked and I'm falling right in line with that 5 and a half hours. So, maybe that's just the number of hours I'm productive. And that's another thing to know. Right? If you time track and you do it the right way, you'll know how much gas you have in the tank each day, which means that you can plan accordingly. Maybe you only have, like, 20 good hours in a week. There's nothing wrong with that. Right? My friend, Carey Nieuwhof has a great book, called At Your Best, where you basically figure out your green zone. Right? Your green zone is where you do the most work or the best work. And for some people, that's the morning. Right? And for some people, that's in the evening after everybody goes to bed and nobody's pinging them on Slack. But, understanding that, hey. I have, like, 4 or 5 good hours of work in me each day, and that's probably a lot, to be honest with you. I probably have 4 hours of good work in me each day, will help you plan your day, plan your week so that you don't get overwhelmed and overbook yourself. Right?
I feel, honestly, I feel a little behind this week. But as I'm recording this, summer has just started, and you might know if you listened to a previous episode, Episode 420, that we're not doing summer camp. And so on the weeks where my wife is working more weekdays than not, which is this week, she's working Monday and Friday, I'm not working on Monday or Friday. I'll get those days back because, she'll work some weekends, and then I'll have those days again. But being able to look at my time tracking and be like, hey. I usually do x amount of hours per week. I know I'll only have this many hours this week. I can plan my projects, I can communicate with my coaching clients, I can block off my calendar, and it sets me up for success.
So, again, if you're, if you find out your friend is pregnant or getting married or whatever, like some big life event and you only know that detail, sure, you can check in with them at some point and be like, hey. Are you still pregnant? Hey. Are you still not married? Right? But if you have those details, you can be more effective. You can be there for your friend. Right?
I guess another way to put it is, like, if you're driving somewhere and you only know the destination, but you don't know how to get there, how are you efficiently going to get there. Right? And so time tracking is not future data, but it's historical data. And if you're looking at, okay, well, every, after a while and you have this data, you go, oh, all right. Well, every month I'm, I seem to be most productive in the mornings. Right? Or in the 3rd week of the month, I only logged 20 hours instead of 40. What happened there? Oh, well, there was a lot of stuff going on. Right? And so you'll know, hey, the 3rd week of the month, right, is when the recital usually is. Or there's, like, a big tournament with your kids or, that's maybe the weekend your spouse works, and so you need to adjust your schedule. You have a good, what is that? a weather vane? Is that what it is where you kinda, you can plan better if even if it's not going, it would, it's not going to be perfect, but you can plan more accordingly. And instead of flying blind, you can have a better idea of how you're going to work.
And if I wasn't time-tracking, this year I started time-tracking in November 2023 properly. Right? I've tried to do this before, and it's failed fantastically. But this time, I did like, for whatever reason, like, I wanted to do it right because I know how important it is. And if I wasn't time tracking properly, then I wouldn't have been able to effectively plan this summer where I'm only maybe working, you know, some days some weeks, I'm only working 3 days per week. And so I wouldn't be able to do that effectively if I wasn't time tracking.
So that's my case for time tracking. And, again, I'm gonna get into apps in a little bit. But before we get into that, well, first, first, I wanna take a break for our sponsors, then we'll kind of get into what's the right way to do it? How do you do it? Is there a wrong way to do it? Because, hopefully, at this point, I have convinced you that you should. So let's take a quick break for our sponsors, and then we'll get back into it.
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Okay. We're back. So don't do it the wrong way. What's the wrong way? It's waiting too long to log things you've already done. So, ideally, you start a timer when you start a task, and then you end a timer when you end a task. I don't do that all the time. It's really hard to do that. Right? Especially if you're going from meeting to meeting and you're trying to track proper things or you get called away from your desk. I get it. Right? But what you shouldn't do is at the end of the day, go what was I doing from 9-9 to 7-9 to 10? What was I doing around noon? Right? You don't want to do that. What you wanna do is try to get it as close as possible. Right? It doesn't need to be it's now I mean, maybe hardcore time trackers will say it needs to be exact, but it doesn't need to be exact. Right? An approximate amount of time. Right? I spent 10 hours on this thing versus I spent 10 hours and 7 minutes on this thing is probably not gonna make a huge difference for you as far as, like, planning goes. So you want to get close. And that means time tracking by starting and stopping timers as you're working on things. And if you forget, try to have a visual cue to remind you. Right?
So, today, actually, I got out of a meeting. I forgot to start my time tracker because I was preparing for the meeting and, or I was coming back from lunch. And after the meeting ended, because I have my time tracker on my stream deck, I looked down and I realized I forgot to time track that.
Now, I also usually have my phone in standby mode, and so this is another kind of big help. I have my phone in standby mode, and the 2 widgets for the charger on my desk for standby mode are a clock and the current running timer. Right? So, it's always in my peripheral vision whether or not I have a timer running. I also have I use an app called Timery. I'll get into that in a little bit but I, you know, in Timery, you can have the timer in your menu bar. And so there are lots of visual cues for me to know if I'm time tracking or not. And this was, this has been so important.
So, I think the biggest problem that you could run into that I've run into in the past is, time tracking large swaths of time retroactively. Right? And so we wanna prevent that, which means we wanna make sure we're using the right tools and putting some right systems in place.
So, let's get into that now. I wanna talk about how I'm doing it. I wanna answer some of your questions, and I wanna get into some of the tools. Right? And so I'll start with this. I didn't start time-tracking everything at first. I started time tracking one thing. We heard this from Mike Schmitz a couple of weeks ago. Right? When talking about Obsidian, like, pick it for pick using Obsidian for one thing to see how you like it. Don't, like, move your entire life into an app the first time you use it. And I recommend the same thing with time tracking.
And so what I did was I wanted to track my reading time. And so I have a reading focus that I put my phone in so that I don't get disturbed while I'm reading, with like notifications or whatever. And on the iPhone, when you set a focus mode, you can also kick off a shortcut. And so, using this app, Timery, which is an amazing iPhone, iPad, and Mac app, I was able to start a reading timer. And then when I came out of the reading focus mode, the reading timer would stop. I do the same thing when I hit record in Ecamm Live. My recording timer automatically starts.
And so one way that you can start time tracking a few things, now this is all in the Mac and Apple ecosystem. So if you are not using a Mac, I'm sorry. I don't have a great system for you, but I'm sure there are you know, timing Toggl works across everything. Right? So maybe you can do some of the stuff with Toggl. I use Timery for the iPhone, which sits on top of Toggl because there are so many better integrations at the iPhone level than Toggl has. Right? Or the Mac level than Toggl has.
So that's what I use, but that's how I started. I didn't start with setting timers. I started with, you know, attaching a timer to something I was already doing, and that helped me see, oh, cool. I read for 5 hours this week. Like, it's really cool to have this data, and that made me want to time track a little bit more.
So, after that, I, again, using Timery, Timery has no, actually, let me double check this. I have buttons on my stream deck. Yeah. So they they just run shortcuts. So Timery has really good shortcut support for again, iPhone, iPad, and Mac. And so I created a few shortcuts that I will make available to members if you wanna get into the nitty gritty of my time tracking and get those shortcuts, you can head over to [streamlined.fm/join]. There's also a link in your podcast player. But, I have a few shortcuts I created to start new timers and stop timers. And so I also have one called add time. So I press that button and it asks me a series of questions. What was the task? What was the project? When did it start? When did it end? And then I can add time easily that way.
So I have 4 buttons on my stream deck. 1 is just to open Timery. One is to start a new saved timer. Timery lets you sell, and save a bunch of timers. So if you're working on projects that you log all the time, you could have those saved timers. I have a stop timer, and I have add time, which also works as a start timer. Right? So if I'm, like, 5 minutes into a task and I realized I forgot to set a timer, I could press add time, add the project, set the start time to 5 minutes ago, and then say I'm still working on it, and the timer will just keep running. So that's huge for me.
If you're just starting out, like, maybe pen and paper or pencil and paper is good. Right? Just keep a notepad by your desk and write those things down as you do them. Right? And, like, the notepad is a good visual cue for you to kinda remember to start time tracking. But that's how I'm doing it.
I'll run through my projects. I have a a whole big note here of, I made a list. So I have a note called time tracking plan, and then, like, things to time track. And so here's everything initially. This was before I started. Right? And so this was just like, here are the things I wanna time track. This podcast and then, like, you know, the subtasks under that, planning, guest booking, recording, post-production promotion, podcast workflows, planning, writing, edit, post, edit/publish, and then promotion. Writing in general, email, blog post, scripts, social posts, recording, work I do for RSS.com, work I do for other people I contract with, video creation, client work, social posts, membership stuff, coaching management, and that's tasks, start-up and shut down, email outreach, finances. I have tinkering, which is creating shortcuts or automations, and then enrichment. Reading and podcasts, parenthesis, not for pleasure. Right? I'm not tracking my per some people time tracking their personal life too. I'm not about that. I just wanna time track to make my business more efficient and my the time I spend in my business more efficient. So those are the things that I said I would track.
If I look in Timery, I'll run through the saved timers because these are the things that I've saved on the fly. So, reading is saved, rss.com, networking, which is meetings pretty much, recording, writing, automation and tinkering, podcast, coaching, management, which is email and task management, and podcast production, which should be separate from recording. That's, like, everything around podcast planning, course creation, management/shutdown routine. I separate that from email and task management. CRM, which is mostly outreach and like, cold outreach and relationship management. Website work, and that's mostly personal websites at this point. Podcast coaching and consulting with Wizards’ Guild, so I'm separately tracking that time, since that's work I do for Justin Moore and Dee over at Creator Wizard. Sponsorship work, which is direct work I'm doing in creating sponsored content, and then talks, workshops, presentations, product work, which at this point is a super secret product I'm working on, and then book writing. Right? Because I'm working on my next book.
Those are the saved projects. If I go into, the, my non saved projects, they're pretty similar. There are a couple of one-off projects here, and then tags are really where I get more granular. So in Timery, you can create projects, and then you can tag projects. And so I have a few dozen tags, like podcast audits, casabona.org, different clients, and things like that so I can get more granular and look into that report. So that's how I'm doing it.
Let me get into your questions. Aaron, I'm told I say Aaron and Aaron the same or the wrong way or something like that. What platforms are you using, for your time tracking? And when a project is done, what metrics are you looking at to see if a project is worth the top time hourly rate?
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This is a great question. So I'm using Timery, which sits on top of Toggl. A couple of apps I didn't mention that could be really helpful are timing and rescue time. Those are both Mac apps that just sit on your computer and then log what app you're in and the website that you're looking at. So, if you're not time tracking, you can atleast look at that and be like, oh, I spent, you know, 4 hours on Twitter today. That's not a great use of my time. Or, hey. I spent 2 hours in Descript, which is good time. Right? So, you can do it that way.
And then just screen time across Mac OS and iOS and iPad OS will do the same thing. Right? It'll show you, like, hey. What apps are you hanging out in the most? How many times did you pick up your phone? And that'll at least give you, like, kind of a fuzzy picture of how you're spending your time. Right? Marvel Snap, I uninstalled the game Marvel snap from my phone because it was, like, far and away the thing I was spending the most time on in my phone. And the cool thing about screen time in Apple is that it'll give you, like, a per-device breakdown, but it'll also give you like the total time across all devices.
And then when a project is done, what metrics are you looking at to see if a project is worth the top time hour rate? So, I know my hourly rate. I have, like I mean, kind of internally, I have a couple, but I know how much I want to charge per hour. So I look at how many hours I spent on a project, and then I multiply that by my hourly rate. I take that number. I compare it to the number that I, if it's a client project. Right? So, like, I'll get into this more in the member's episode, but, if the member's portion. But, you know, for Wizards’ Guild, I'll look at how much time I spend in Wizards’ Guild. I'll look at how much I get paid per month with Wizards’ Guild. And then if the amount of time I spent times my hourly rate is less than or equal to what I got paid from Wizards’ Guild, then great. That's a good time investment. Right? So, that's usually what I look at for, like, personal projects, that's a little bit trickier. Right? Like, I'm writing a book. I'm gonna spend a lot of time on my book without any return on investment in the short term, probably. Right? And so for that, I would need another system in place to be like, okay. How many books have I sold? How much work is coming in from the books? How many speaking engagements am I getting from the books? So that's a little bit tougher. Right? And that's, like, you know, that's something that you'll have to kinda figure out.
But, yeah, I mean, that's for a for a client project, that's exactly what I do. How much did I get paid versus my hourly rate times the number of hours I charge or the number of hours I worked on it? Okay. Alex, shout out to Alex Sanfilippo. He asked me a couple of questions. I think, I touched on most of these, but tools that you suggest highly recommend Timery, or you're sitting on top of Toggl. I don't even pay for Toggl like, Toggl's free, and I pay for Timery, which is, like, maybe a scathing indictment on Toggl. But my VA also uses Toggl, so that's, you know, I love that tool specifically, and then Screen Time in iOS apps or Apple apps, and then maybe something like Timing is really good if you just wanted to get like, an overall view of like, where you're spending, where you're passively spending your time or whatever.
Categorizing tasks. Yeah. So I ran through this a little bit. I basically now this is like, I, you know, I probably wanna optimize this a little bit, but I took the big areas of my life, and I broke them down into projects. And the way I'm doing it now is, like, if I don't have something, so, like, with my book, I already have a project called writing and then I have tags for newsletter, blog post, script, and then I added book. Right? So I added the tag to, like, kind of a preexisting thing.
So what I would recommend you do is kind of look at everything that you're doing. Right? So this is gonna take a little prework, like, write down the places where you're spending your time and the projects you're working on, and then turn them into projects, And then, you know or turn, like, the areas into projects maybe. This is all depends on how your brain works. But that's how I do it.
And then I have tags for the more granular stuff. So, like, I have podcast coaching. And under podcast coaching, I have the tags, done for you podcasting, podcast audits, creator wizard, because that's just like general coaching, and 1 on 1 coaching. Right? So those are the 4 ways that I can make money coaching, and I wanna see how like, where I'm spending that time. So, that's kind of how I categorize the tasks by projects and then tags.
How often do you track and for how long before going back to make adjustments? I think I tracked for about a month before looking at the data. It's probably like, 2 months. Right? You wanna see month over month. And if 1 month is weird, like, if you start time tracking today and summer's weird, you probably wanna track for a few months to see how that's going. But I try to, like, look quarterly to see how things are going or when I complete a project, or if there's something that pays me monthly, I'll look back each month and see how that's going. Right? Because and sometimes it's like I should probably should spend a little bit more time here for what I'm getting paid. So, you know, though that's the kind of stuff that I so I'll kinda look at it on a weekly, monthly, and quarterly basis to see the trends and how things are going. And then for members, I do my monthly retro or my monthly reviews, month in review, where I will walk through the time tracking sheet. So, I'm really transparent about that.
Okay. So Tessa says, I think you should add Timeular to your discussion. It's, I bought their physical product, which you tap on to start time tracking. So this is really good. Right? And this leads right into Tim's question. How can we do it in a way that saves more time than it takes? Shortcut, I think I touched on some of these. Right? Shortcuts and focus modes. If you have a Mac, right, with apps that can run shortcuts, then, like, Ecamm Live can run shortcuts. So I have it kick off my recording shortcut. Right? Or the stream deck is another place that's super helpful. If you don't have a Stream Deck, Timery has widgets, and so you can have the widgets on your iPad screen or a separate screen or on your iPhone, and just start a timer there. That's gonna be really helpful. I think it's the visual cues are the really important part. Because once you kind of set it up and organize it and you can set it up and organize it, like, as you do stuff. So, like, oh, I'm starting a new thing. Let me create a project. Let me create a couple of relevant tags and clean it up later. Gather the data and then optimize. Right? It's just like coding. Right? You wanna get the code out there. You wanna get a first version, and then you wanna refactor. So, that's what I would recommend.
And that is the end of the questions. So I hope you found this episode useful. If you have any questions about time tracking, definitely let me know. I'm happy to answer any more questions. Maybe I'll do like a follow-up episode with this. And then again, for members, I'll be digging into the numbers and how it's helped me, and I'll probably end up just doing like the retro at the end of this as well.
So, thanks so much for listening. If you wanna become a member, you can go to [streamlined.fm/join]. You can find links to everything I talked about in the description or at [streamlined.fm/424].
Again, thanks so much for listening, and until next time. I'll see you out there.