I was told to log every hour for a month, so I did

At the end of September I sat on a call with someone who has grown further than me and asked him, more or less, how to stop feeling scattered. I told him what I believe to be true, which is that most of my week is spent responding to things that land on me rather than choosing what to work on. He did not disagree. He just pointed out that I had no evidence, only a feeling, and you cannot hire against a feeling or automate one.

His prescription was simple and slightly annoying. Log everything for thirty days. Not just work. Sleep, meals, the gym, the two hours that disappear into videos at eleven at night. Business and personal, twenty four hours a day, and then put the whole lot through the system I had just spent twenty minutes telling him about.

Why I did not build myself a tracker

Because I have done that before and it did not work. I made a habit chart at one point. I have barely opened it since. The thing is, the days when the data would matter most are exactly the days I am least likely to open anything, so any system that waits for me to sit down and fill it in is going to have holes exactly where the truth is.

So the logging is not my job. It happens in the background of ordinary work. If I mention on a call that I spent the morning on a build review, or that I went to the gym, or that an hour went on chasing a supplier, that gets written down at the time by the system I already talk to all day. I am not asked to remember anything at the end of the day, because I would not.

Two fields do all the work

Hours by category is mildly interesting. Everyone already knows roughly how much of their week is meetings. The two fields that actually answer my question are narrower than that.

• Was it on the business or in it, meaning did it build the thing or did it feed the thing
• Did I choose it, or did it arrive

That second one is the complaint I made on the call, turned into something countable. If it turns out that most of my hours arrived rather than were chosen, then the problem is not that I am busy, it is that somebody else is setting my week. That is a different fix. You do not solve it with better discipline, you solve it by changing who handles the things that arrive.

The rules I set before starting, because otherwise it is theatre

Nothing gets invented. If I went quiet for four hours and nobody knows what happened, the log says nothing for four hours. A gap is honest and an average is not, and one made up line would make the whole month worthless as evidence.

A calendar entry is also not proof I attended anything. Anything taken from a diary or an email rather than from my own mouth gets marked as such, so I can see later how much of the record is me and how much is inference.

If the month comes back covering less than about six hours in ten, it cannot carry a decision about hiring or automating anything, and the report has to say that rather than quietly averaging over its own hole.

I am a few days in and already mildly uncomfortable, which I take as a sign it is working. The point was never the chart. It is that I keep saying I want time to grow the business, and until I can see the week I actually had rather than the one I remember, I have no idea which part of it to hand over first.