Paula Rizzo walks through how to track your time and get more done. Use Toggl or a spreadsheet to log task durations, block distracting websites with RescueTime, prioritize your daily tasks, work in short focused blocks, and reward yourself for finishing.
Hey, it's Paula Rizzo from ListProducer.com. Good to see you again. So today I'm going to talk a little bit about tracking your time. And as a TV producer, I know time all too well, and so I know exactly down to the second how long 30 seconds feels like, how long, you know, a minute feels like. But most people don't. That's not how you really gauge your day. So how many times have you said Oh, it's just gonna take me 1 minute. It'll just be 5 more minutes. Just 5 minutes. And then 20 minutes later, you come waltzing out of your apartment, you know, to do that one last thing. But here's the thing. You can actually figure out how long it takes you to do these things so that you're more productive. So that when you say, "Just 5 minutes," you know exactly how long that is, and also how long your tasks are gonna take. Because so many times we think one thing and it's really the total opposite. So I'm gonna give you a couple of tools to use to actually track your your time so that you're more efficient, so that maybe you're able to say, all right, this is going to take a little longer than 5 minutes, so I'm going to leave it for tomorrow, you know, put it on my list for the following day. So one way that you can do that is through a website called Toggl. And what you can do in Toggl is that you write down the task that you're working on, and I would suggest doing this for an entire week or 2 weeks and going through all of the things that you do regularly, like how long does it take you to check emails, how long does it take you to write this certain report or whatever it is that you do in your business and in your life. How long does it actually take you to get to the supermarket? You know, you think, oh, it'll just take 15 minutes, it'll just take 5 minutes, and it ends up taking a lot longer. So go to Toggl, put in all of the tasks and the things that you do, and just keep track of it. You can do it in an Excel sheet too, but Toggl is nice because it's, you know, suited just for that. The other thing that you can do is to rein in where you're spending your time online. Many of us know that you get on Facebook and you start looking at this and this one had an anniversary and look at this one's pictures from— oh, they went to Spain and they're so fabulous. And then down the rabbit hole and you've gotten nothing done for the day, but you're all caught up on your friends. RescueTime is a website that you can go to that will actually limit your time on certain websites. If you tell it, "Hey, I don't want to spend X amount of time on Facebook," social media on, let's say, Facebook or on email, it will limit the time that you are able to spend on that, which is really great. Um, and then the other thing that you can do too to be able to track your time and make the most of it is to prioritize. And when you come in in the morning, when you have your list, being able to look at it and say, okay, here are the things that are top-notch, these are the things that really need to get done today. And so these are the before lunch things, these are the after lunch things, and just kind of set up your day that way so that you're they're able to make enough time for the really important stuff. And the stuff that's not that important, if it had to go to the next day, would it be so terrible? No. But you know you have that pad room that you can sort of kill off those things and put them onto the following day. Same thing happens in TV news. We do this all the time where we'll have a whole bunch of stories in the newscast, but when one report runs a little bit over, what we end up doing is killing one of those last stories. Because it was in there, we wanted to get to it, but you know what, we don't have time for it. So we're gonna kill it. Maybe, maybe we can use it tomorrow. Maybe we can use it a different time. And another little tip that I'm going to give you is to use the Pomodoro Technique. And that is 25 minutes of targeted time. So I think 25 minutes is a little too long because for me, I have a very short attention span. So I do like 10 minutes or 15 minutes where I just go through one task for 15 minutes. Let's say I'm going to do, you know, email and I need to write back to a whole bunch of emails. I'll look at the clock, I'll say, okay, I'm putting 15 minutes on the clock and I'm going to just go through these emails and get through as many as I can possibly get through. When you have that short, you know, very focused time, it's much easier to get things done. So the Pomodoro Technique. And the most important thing of all of this is to reward yourself at the end. When you actually do track your time and you're doing things in a more efficient way, you should take a pause and take a breath and say to yourself, "You know what? I did a good thing this day." Today I was actually on top of my game. I can go get a massage. I can go call my friend. I can go on Facebook. I can do whatever, you know, little thing to kind of give yourself a little carrot at the end of the, at the end of the tunnel to stay motivated. Well, thanks for watching, and email me at paula@listproducer.com, and I'll see you next time. Bye!
