Working at a financial trust means that many companies that you meet make a bad first impression. Because they come in the shape of ca. 1-10 binders and unless you love handling paper, reading balance sheets and legal documents, and breathing dust, you just won’t like it much. Luckily, reading binders isn’t part of my job description, even though I do it because I want to understand how this business works from start to finish. But, to keep my sanity in check, I try to mix it up between a. doing the (boring) work, b. keeping the overview, and c. doing work that I love.

After writing my work-life balance post some weeks ago, I decided to do one thing from the start: I would keep track of all my professional activities in Excel. Another thing I did was to colour-code each activity and note down how much time I spend on it each day and week, in order to track patterns. I am now in week 7, meaning that I have some meaningful data about this.

While I’m not going to share this data with you because I think it’s entirely irrelevant to your life, I will share some lessons that I learned from my experience so far:

• Tracking you time requires a certain kind of discipline, as well as a kind of heuristic thinking: a. you need to continuously do it; b. you don’t need to be entirely precise on whether you spend 15 min. more or less on something (I track each 15 min. in my sheet). P.S. Nothing inspires you to keep such a list as much as being paid by the hour (which is how I started with this habit).
• Asking lot’s of questions is the single most useful thing to do if you want to improve your job-satisfaction: The last three weeks, I was busy analysing a number of companies through their documentation, in French. A complete Nightmare! However, spending just a few hours with someone that has been doing this for years, meant that I quickly learned what’s relevant and what isn’t.
• A person is only really efficient a few hours per day: OK, I should already know this as a freelance consultant who charges by the hour, and you probably know this too. But seriously, track your time during one week and you’ll know this is absolutely true.
• A person is more effective at doing the stuff he/she loves than the stuff he/she doesn’t: Again, kind of an obvious point, but I can see through my time-tracking that job-satisfaction goes down and procrastination goes up after just an hour or more spent on non-enjoyable activities. I, personally, hate admin work, but love anything involving creating or learning. Productivity adds more value to the company so try to find an alignment between the stuff that you love and projects for the company you work for. Outsource / delegate the stuff that you hate / dislike / makes you procrastinate more.
• Expect a 30% return on investment on a todo-list: Meaning that for every 10 items you write down, you’ll probably manage 3 in the short-term. With a few exceptions, I generally find that those todo’s that don’t get handled are usually not that important anyway / sort themselves out automatically / have a longer due-date. P.S. I finish every day composing thoughts about what needs to be done the next day(s).
• Pay attention to how you spend the rest of your time: Work isn’t life and life isn’t work. And how you spend you life will very much affect your work. Things to track include amount of sleep every day, exercise, diet, and learning. Regarding the latter, I keep track of the (study) books that I read, podcasts I listen to, and blog-posts I write. While diet, sleep, and exercise is relevant to productivity in the short-term (that day, that week, that month), learning affects the long-term. I think a good ratio is 10-20% of time that should be spent on the latter, of course mileage may vary.

That’s it for today, hope it added some value to your life and that it made you open an excel sheet to track your time. If you need a template for setting up your own schedule, drop a comment or send me a mail.

Vincent

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2. What I dislike about business plans [addendum]
3. A mental experiment: Do employers benefit from high visibility of their job-openings?
4. An e’diary part 2: what are the responsibilities of an entrepreneur
5. A brief review of "Valuation" — A Strategy Book