Intentional Data

I often say (a bit tongue in cheek) that even if I know nothing about someone, if they show me their financial budget, I’ll be able to tell you their priorities. I know what my own budget looks like and thought I knew what my priorities were… until recently when I learned about time budgets. I found someone who talked about how she tracks every minute of her time, and how it helps her to be intentional. While I’ve tried time tracking in the past by using a spreadsheet where you were supposed to fill out every 15 minutes what you were doing, I always forgot I was supposed to be tracking just mere hours in.

Enter: Technology. The person who talked about tracking every second of her time used an app called Toggl. She also talked about loosely tracking; it’s ok to not have it perfect, because it will still identify trends. I promptly downloaded the Toggl widget to the home screen of my phone so it’s just a quick press of the button to track all my time.

I’ve now been tracking every second of my day for about 4 weeks. While it sounds quite tedious, it takes me less than 10 minutes a day (trust me – I now know for certain!) Of course, when you start tracking anything, you want to be better than the neutral state version of yourself so you may do things out of the norm at first. By neutral state, I mean the hours spent scrolling the internet entirely too long. Or staying up until 2AM for no reason? Funny how that has miraculously been easier to avoid when I know it’ll show up in my time log!

Instead, I’ve replaced the doomscrolling with audiobooks, and have more intentional one on one time with the most important people (and dogs) in my life. Prior to this time experiment, my husband and I were sometimes like ships in the night; part of the expectation of being married to a firefighter, but certainly not ideal. We’ve been more intentional about spending quality time together.

It’s been an extremely interesting experiment; and I’ve learned I do spend more time than I’d like to admit looking for misplaced items (especially shoes) in my house. I’ll hopefully stick to it for the ‘better habits’ benefits I’ve been seeing. Stay tuned!