Let’s talk about time tracking for solopreneurs! Do you know where your time goes? How should solopreneurs use time tracking in their business, and what’s the best time tracking software?
We’re going to get into all of that in this video!
You can get time tracking tutorials all over the Internet — what’s different about THIS video is that I’m showing you my specific method for using it as a solopreneur, and how to organize your systems to make the BEST use of time tracking (I’m even going to share my screen and walk you through how some of this works today).
These are best practices for solopreneur time tracking specifically. You won’t find this anywhere else!
Let’s dive in…
WHY USE TIME TRACKING AS A SOLOPRENEUR?
5 REASONS:
- Helps you stay on track when you’re on the clock (it’s built-in accountability!)
- Helps you understand WHERE your time is (really) going — you might THINK you know where your time goes, but you won’t ACTUALLY know until you do time tracking.
- Helps you to know EXACTLY how long it takes you to do each task — which makes it 10x easier for you to accurately estimate how long tasks will take you in the future, so you can give yourself the correct amount of time to complete tasks. This is VERY important if you’re often scrambling to meet deadlines.
- Enables you to more clearly differentiate between time vs energy. E.g. Even if you think “This task only takes me 30 minutes,” it might ACTUALLY require mental preparation and recovery time before and after, turning it into a 2-hour task.
- Enables you to adjust your existing schedule to better suit your energy needs and your most productive times of day/days of the week. E.g. You might realize you always need a break at an unexpected time of day, or you get distracted by one project vs another, etc.
TOP 3 BEST PRACTICES for time tracking as a solopreneur:
- Use time tracking for EVERYTHING — not just billable hours!
- Approach it from a JUDGMENT-FREE perspective. This is about gathering information and understanding yourself better. Don’t feel bad about what you discover!
- Make sure to set aside time for analyzing the data — you can do this more frequently in the beginning (e.g. every couple days or once a week), and then shift into monthly or quarterly assessments for smaller pivots. There isn’t any point to doing this unless you review the information and make USE of it.
MY FAVOURITE METHOD FOR TIME TRACKING:
Toggl time tracking software! It’s totally free, and you can use it on your desktop or the app version. Some of my clients find it much easier to use the app, but personally I prefer having it open on my computer every day, all day long.
Toggl is robust and there’s SO MUCH you could do with it, but what I’m going to show you today is one small part of how I use it and how my solopreneur clients use it — because you can go to the Toggl website and get tutorials there, but you can’t get my solopreneur time tracking methods anywhere else.
7 BEST PRACTICES for using the Toggl time tracking system:
1. Organize your Toggl time tracking “Clients” section into ACTUAL clients that you’re working with, but also create separate “Clients” for each of your business departments. Then organize your “Projects” section into your actual projects for each clients, BUT also your business department’s subdivisions.
More on this in Productivity Powerhouse:
2. Organize your departments by numbered codes (so they show up in the specific order you want). These can also be broken down into larger projects within each department, e.g. CD is for Creative Department, but you could do CDC for courses and CDB for books.
Create a legend for yourself to keep this organized, e.g. in a spreadsheet or Google doc — This allows you to add additional “projects” (or subcategories) in the future. E.g. OD001: General email communications could turn into "OD001a" at some point in the future, if you decided at that point that you wanted to add "OD001b: Responding to direct messages on social media").
3. Use colour-coding to differentiate between types of tasks within a department — especially if you have a lot of different projects within a department.
4. Press the play button to START the clock, and fill in the description and client/project AFTER. This is REALLY useful if you don’t know how to describe what you’re doing or if you tend to jump between tasks. This is also VERY important to do for jumping around between tasks — press “pause” when you need to!
5. Add a time tracking review and assessment into your monthly or quarterly business audits. This way, you can assess your hours worked, what adjustments to make to your schedule, etc.
More on this in Productivity Powerhouse:
It might feel at first like it’s challenging to remember to use Toggl! Keep it open at all times on a tab your browser, so you can *see* it right there.
Don’t worry if you forget to press play or stop; you can adjust the times afterward if needed. The more you use it, the more it will turn into a habit!
In this playlist, we’ve talked about the importance of time AND energy management when you’re an overworked solopreneur, how to know whether your issue is one of ENERGY vs TIME (and what steps to take in either case), plus we’ve now explored best practices for using time tracking as a solopreneur.
But you might still be experiencing an issue where your current time management strategies AREN’T working the way you want. That can be frustrating!
Stay tuned for next week’s video on this exact topic! We’ll address the top mistakes you’re making with time management so you can fix them, once and for all.