For a little over a month now, I’ve been tracking all my working time. It was anathema to me after the years I spent detailing my life in six minute increments in a past life, but I wanted data as I strive for constant improvement. So far, the results have been sobering.

I was well aware that I’ve not had a great deal of client work over the past month. This part of the summer is normally slow for M&A activity as people take summer vacations. There have been a couple of weeks, though, where the time breakdown was truly stark. The bulk of my working hours have been spent in meetings, both internal and external. Some of the internal meetings have been permitted to balloon given the paucity of other tasks, but we’re still working to establish regular agendas to tighten those up in advance of a surge in client work that should arrive soon. I’ve also padded the external meeting category through a categorization glitch/decision to have things like webinars and CLEs count in that category. My content creation stats also look good from a time perspective, but the output hasn’t matched. Part of that is learning the new website back end interface, but most of it is not dialing in when I’m working on articles. I have finally started working in earnest on one that has been in the queue for months, but it really should have been completed by now. Regardless, seeing the stats and my current content backlog offers a kick up the back side.

Dead spots also persist in my workdays, but I am getting an even better grip on when my energy levels tend to ebb and flow during a typical day. Armed with that knowledge, I’ll make a few tweaks to my default meeting availability in the coming days. Despite this apparently stuttering start, I will continue to track my working time moving forward. Doing so will continue to provide me with data that I can consider and feedback on the changes I make.