Record, report, export, read and act!

My time-management problem started, when I started freelancing and it never ended ever since. I find every day something, what completes my puzzle. Yes, time-management for me was a puzzle, which I still haven’t completed yet.

Managing your time starts, like managing a diet. You have no idea, how big a portion should be. You think an adult person really needs 2000 kcal / day (by losing 0 (zero) kcal doing exercises (in most cases of true professionals, who sit straight at the desk for about 8-10 hours per day) and by assuming that the sort of walk to reach your car and buying groceries or take-away Shushie is enough cardio for a day). Then you run a mile and know the difference.

I had no idea, what time could be measured with (a clock, so funny, hahaha). I needed to understand, that all my activities take different amount of time. Thanks to Andrew Morris I started to think about a day, like a container for all my activities, and what I can fit into one of them. I know, I already split my time to get hobbies and free-time back into my life, I am not talking about this. (that already works with setting working hours and whatever happens, sticking to it. Hard enough sometimes, but nobody touches my free-time and my exercise time anymore!)

Now I am in a much further phase, where I need to organize my business and I have no time to do it, because I work all the time. I have various software to manage my business and my time. TO3000 is known. It helps me to set up my projects, to track how many words I translated for what client, in what specialty field, for how much. This is the tool, which helps me to kick a$es. Having over 40 clients, three source languages and four CAT tools more or less regularly I need to know, who to keep, who to welcome and who to let go.

ManicTime manager – also suggested, by another brilliant colleague, Helen – gives me an exact cross-section of what I do, when I am at my pc. Now, what you can see on the image below is breath-taking.

Not, because all the colors are beautiful – also – but, because you can see, how I really spent my time yesterday. And it is completely the truth.

Another breath-taking fact is that I was all day in front of my computer and worked only 2:16 hours with Studio and 5 minutes with memoq. (Yesterday I also had an Excel translation, which was easier to do in Excel so the other 26 minutes count too, but still: I started being at my pc at 8 AM, was here until 6:20 PM and only worked 3 hours. True, I had a free afternoon).

Now, what you can not see, but I include here is that the whole day I only was 7:17 minutes on Facebook and I emailed away 2:04 hours and I was 42:35 minutes on skype. So here it is, I worked only 25% and used google chrome 48% of my time (yes, I use internet based dictionaries and I have a google email account (business, obviously)), but still…can I not do it for less time? Is this, where an administrative help could help? Emailing 2 hours per day?

This is, why I love recording, what I do with every mean, I have. Should this be TO3000, Manic Time, Studio,  or the apps, like MyFitnessPal, Runkeeper, My Library, whatever, because I learnt that data becomes information only after being processed.

Here is the last breath-taking fact for today.

I need to let agencies learn that I will have emailing time and won’t interrupt my day all the time just to confirm and “yes” any question, because they have time in that moment. Not too bad for a free tool, right? Let’s see, how this can be embedded into my new idea: separating two hours – yes, both of them continuously – for my business growth.