872: ACTION SATURDAY (track your time!)

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Hey, what is up?

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Wontrepreneurs and entrepreneurs all over the world it's Brian LoFermento here, host of the Wontrepreneur to Entrepreneur podcast, and this is an Action Saturday episode that I'll tell you what.

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When I was thinking about actions this week, I wanted one that satisfies two criteria One, it's something that we all benefit from and that we can and should do this coming week.

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And then two, something that we probably aren't already doing.

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And so when I looked at my most recent actions and habits and routines really to optimize my week, to refine and get better and improve all of my businesses and my own performance the one action that I'll tell you what I haven't talked about it publicly, but I've found myself doing it a lot over the past four weeks I actually invested in a tool to help me do this, and that action is tracking my time.

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So this week's action really is about tracking your time and it's something that, when we're all freelancers, it's something we have to do when we are on the hook for hourly client projects and hourly work and client work in general A lot of times revolves around tracking your time.

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But for so many of us, when it comes to our own businesses because we're entrepreneurs, we are business owners in our own rights.

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We don't necessarily track our time, and here's the thing.

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What I really want to talk about in today's Action Saturday episode is that when we don't track our time well, we always know what we hope to do in any given week.

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We all have our lists, whether it's a to-do list or whether it's a list of weekly goals and tasks or projects that we hope to complete.

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We all have those lists, but then somehow, seven days later, at the end of the week, going into a new week, we have not completed that list.

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And the question then becomes where did all that time go?

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What is taking up all of my time?

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And the truth is, unless you keep track of it, you will not know where your time is going.

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And I mean that in two senses One, what is it that you end up working on?

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Not what do you say you're going to work on, but what are you actually working on.

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And then, two, how much time are you spending on each of these things?

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You might think that being on social media is only using X amount of minutes per day or per week, when the reality is.

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Unless you're tracking it, you can't analyze it and refine and optimize it, and so that's why I feel so strongly about this and really to help you.

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Tracking shouldn't be something that adds more complexity to your week.

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It shouldn't be something that adds more of a workload to your week.

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There are so many incredible tools out there to help you with this process, so I recently invested in this tool.

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I purchased the annual subscription.

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I'm not affiliated with them in any way.

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They probably have an affiliate program.

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I am not one, so I'm just sharing this with you because I personally like it and it's called rise.

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It's R I Z E dot I O riseio.

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And I really like this because when I installed it on my computer, it just tracks what I'm doing.

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So if I'm in on gmailcom, that will show up hey, you were doing email for this amount of time.

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If I get sidetracked and I end up scrolling through Reddit or somewhere else, it will pop up on my screen and it'll say, hey, is this a distraction?

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Because it knows that redditcom is not a work website.

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If I am doing things like if I'm in Canva, for example, it automatically assigns that to design work, so it automatically categorizes things without me doing anything.

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It's really cool.

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Then, at the end of every day and at the end of every week I get a report and it says hey, here's how much time literally hours and minutes you spent within each category.

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If I want to drill down into the email category, or if I want to drill down into the design or social media or distracted category whatever it is I can simply click through and I can see the websites I was visiting.

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I can see what programs I was using, for example, right now for this podcast, I record my solo episodes inside of Audacity, so it knows that Audacity is an audio recording tool, so I can see exactly how much time the podcast is taking me every single week.

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So that's a really advanced software tool that I use for this benefit.

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If you want to keep it really simple, use something that's free, like Toggle T-O-G-G-L.

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Toggl is incredible.

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You can simply start the tracking.

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It's completely pen and a piece of paper.

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Have a notebook handy at all times.

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I think you're going to start seeing a lot of things that aren't the reality or the perceived reality that you have in your mind.

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You're probably not being as efficient.

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You're probably not being as productive.

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You're not probably not putting in as many hours as you think you are, especially for those of you who are side hustling, you're still working to build up your business on the side In addition to your nine to five job.

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You probably don't realize where your hours are going with that side hustle, which, for those of you who are in that situation, it's probably even more important for you to optimize your time.

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And even just saying that out loud now, I'm just like no, all of us who are are full-time entrepreneurs.

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It's probably even more important for us because we have way more unaccounted for hours.

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We have so many more available hours than people who are side hustling.

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So I think that just really reveals it's important for all of us to take this action for a million different ways.

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Paint that reality, paint that real life picture of what's going on with your time so that you can start making more intentional and strategic uses of it and you can actually start refining and optimizing it.

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But you can't do any of this unless you start tracking your time.

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So that's this week's action.

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Get out there, take action.

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I'm going to tie tomorrow's solo Sunday episode in with this one, so I'll see you right back here, same time, same place tomorrow.