Now, that wasn't exactly accurate, I am a hard working guy. And actually most everyday lots of things would get done. But these were rarely the things I wanted to get done. Mostly it was fighting fires, responding to the immediate needs of my customers (internal and external), etc. What I realized was that although I did a lot of work it felt like it was rarely any of my project work that, in my mind, was my primary responsibility. And because of that I often left work feeling that I'd accomplished very little. For these important projects anyway, I was falling behind, and failing to get "anything" done.
And I got sick of feeling that way. So a year ago I resolved to myself to figure out how this was happening.
I started by trying to first understand how I worked. I had some ideas of how I worked and of how a typical day went but I decided that working from a template generated these ideas about what happened just wasn’t going to be accurate enough. First of all, I theorized that how I thought the day went and how it actually went were likely two very different things. If you would have asked me how an average day broke down when I started this project I would've said.
40% General Client Support
20% System Maintenance
10% My Projects
20% AdHoc Projects
10% Other
I was curious. Was this the actual breakdown? And how much variance were in these different categories? Which categories stole from which? And, most importantly, how did each of these categories influence my overall output?
It quickly became clear that I needed to start tracking how I spent my day. And, to do it right, I'd really need to be able to do this in easily and in detail. So what to do? Easy. Hit up lifehacker.com by using a google search (site:lifehacker.com time tracking). First hit: top 5 time tracking applications. Top application: Klok.
What a find! I quickly found that Klok did a great job of tracking my daily tasks. I simply created five categories of tasks in Klok (matching the five that I broke down above) and then filled in these categories with the various sub-projects that they had. After that, all I had to do was make a quick update to Klok before I started working on a task and Klok would take care of the rest.
And so I Kloked. I Kloked in detail. (No, I did not have a category for bathroom breaks.) And in the end it turns out that I probably Kloked in too much detail, but for the purposes of this project that was okay.
And I did this for almost ten months.
And what did I find? How accurate was my breakdown? In short, not very.
Interestingly, of my five categories they essentially all broke down to the same amount of time.
18.0% General Client Support
20.0% System Maintenance
21.6% My Projects
20.7% AdHoc Projects
19.7% Other
And what about the category that I was most concerned about (My Projects)? Interestingly, this was the category I spent the most time on and I never would have guessed that before tracking with Klok.
However the data did provide great insight into why “nothing” ever seemed to get done with these projects. And to understand what happens we need to take a closer look at these five categories and how they relate to each other.
My workplace is very focused on high levels of customer satisfaction and responsiveness, because of this I know that the expectations of my managers are that when I receive a call from someone that needs help I need to answer that call and help that person get a resolution. This is, and always will be, a priority. This means that time cannot be taken from the 18% General Client Support. There may be weeks that this is higher, and there may be weeks where this is lower but for all practical purposes I can write off 18% of my time every week to helping with problems that come up.
20% System Maintenance? That category is also a priority. There are daily administration tasks that must be done as a matter of basic operations. System maintenance needs to be performed to keep things running. Right off another 20% of every week to these tasks.
The 19.7% Other category? Kind of the catchall category that includes things like HR related meetings or work tasks. General meetings and other kinds of miscellany that are also mostly unavoidable and, therefore, result in another 19.7% loss.
So what’s that leave for project work?
42.3% of a work week.
And that gets split up among the remaining two categories. My Projects and AdHoc Projects. What are these? My projects consist of projects that I’ve identified as most essential to my core job responsibilities. There were eight of these projects that I worked on over the course of these ten months.
What are AdHoc Projects? These are projects that are of primary importance to others. I get involved because I have a specific level of technical expertise that is often beneficial, or even (sometimes) necessary, for the completion of their projects. And although these projects are also something I’m responsible for they often fit in the “all other duties as assigned” job description catchall. I had 31 AdHoc projects over the course of the ten tracked months.
Maybe you can see where I’m going here. I hypothesized that with the two task categories that I could actually manage the workload (the other 57.7% is already accounted for and outside of my control) there would be one task that I would steal time from to feed the other. And I hypothesized that this would be the AdHoc projects. And, when you think about it, that’s really the only way it could be. Considering that the other three categories are an accepted part of what has to be done every week, in order to get work done in one of these categories I would have to take from the other. And the data showed just that.
Month-to-Month time breakdown
Week-to-week time breakdown
Just by looking at these graphs you can see that the data is validating some of the hypothesis. With the week-to-week graph you can see that there were times when My Project Work would completely go away and others when AdHoc Project Work would disappear. That was rarely the case with the other categories. And you can see that these other three categories stayed relatively constant which also validates the hypothesis.
Further data analysis also validates this. Although the mean amount of time that was spent on these tasks was essentially the same (this is reflected in the breakdown where they were all near 20%) the standard of deviation was very different. The standard of deviation (per week) for the three non-project related categories were 2:46, 3:02, and 2:45. Adhoc Project work had a weekly standard of deviation of 5:09 and My Project works standard of deviation was 5:46! This showed definitively that my hypothesis was right, time was mostly stolen from My Projects to feed the AdHoc projects.
So was this how nothing got done? Well, yes. I could clearly tell that this was why I had a difficult time with getting “something” (my projects) done. The Klok data also gave insight to how I could be more efficient in organizing how I spent my day and the inefficiencies of doing multiple projects concurrently versus serially, etc. Oh yeah… and I also had to figure out what to do about AdHoc Projects stealing from My Projects! But that’s for next time…
And I got sick of feeling that way. So a year ago I resolved to myself to figure out how this was happening.
I started by trying to first understand how I worked. I had some ideas of how I worked and of how a typical day went but I decided that working from a template generated these ideas about what happened just wasn’t going to be accurate enough. First of all, I theorized that how I thought the day went and how it actually went were likely two very different things. If you would have asked me how an average day broke down when I started this project I would've said.
40% General Client Support
20% System Maintenance
10% My Projects
20% AdHoc Projects
10% Other
I was curious. Was this the actual breakdown? And how much variance were in these different categories? Which categories stole from which? And, most importantly, how did each of these categories influence my overall output?
It quickly became clear that I needed to start tracking how I spent my day. And, to do it right, I'd really need to be able to do this in easily and in detail. So what to do? Easy. Hit up lifehacker.com by using a google search (site:lifehacker.com time tracking). First hit: top 5 time tracking applications. Top application: Klok.
What a find! I quickly found that Klok did a great job of tracking my daily tasks. I simply created five categories of tasks in Klok (matching the five that I broke down above) and then filled in these categories with the various sub-projects that they had. After that, all I had to do was make a quick update to Klok before I started working on a task and Klok would take care of the rest.
And so I Kloked. I Kloked in detail. (No, I did not have a category for bathroom breaks.) And in the end it turns out that I probably Kloked in too much detail, but for the purposes of this project that was okay.
And I did this for almost ten months.
And what did I find? How accurate was my breakdown? In short, not very.
Interestingly, of my five categories they essentially all broke down to the same amount of time.
18.0% General Client Support
20.0% System Maintenance
21.6% My Projects
20.7% AdHoc Projects
19.7% Other
And what about the category that I was most concerned about (My Projects)? Interestingly, this was the category I spent the most time on and I never would have guessed that before tracking with Klok.
However the data did provide great insight into why “nothing” ever seemed to get done with these projects. And to understand what happens we need to take a closer look at these five categories and how they relate to each other.
My workplace is very focused on high levels of customer satisfaction and responsiveness, because of this I know that the expectations of my managers are that when I receive a call from someone that needs help I need to answer that call and help that person get a resolution. This is, and always will be, a priority. This means that time cannot be taken from the 18% General Client Support. There may be weeks that this is higher, and there may be weeks where this is lower but for all practical purposes I can write off 18% of my time every week to helping with problems that come up.
20% System Maintenance? That category is also a priority. There are daily administration tasks that must be done as a matter of basic operations. System maintenance needs to be performed to keep things running. Right off another 20% of every week to these tasks.
The 19.7% Other category? Kind of the catchall category that includes things like HR related meetings or work tasks. General meetings and other kinds of miscellany that are also mostly unavoidable and, therefore, result in another 19.7% loss.
So what’s that leave for project work?
42.3% of a work week.
And that gets split up among the remaining two categories. My Projects and AdHoc Projects. What are these? My projects consist of projects that I’ve identified as most essential to my core job responsibilities. There were eight of these projects that I worked on over the course of these ten months.
What are AdHoc Projects? These are projects that are of primary importance to others. I get involved because I have a specific level of technical expertise that is often beneficial, or even (sometimes) necessary, for the completion of their projects. And although these projects are also something I’m responsible for they often fit in the “all other duties as assigned” job description catchall. I had 31 AdHoc projects over the course of the ten tracked months.
Maybe you can see where I’m going here. I hypothesized that with the two task categories that I could actually manage the workload (the other 57.7% is already accounted for and outside of my control) there would be one task that I would steal time from to feed the other. And I hypothesized that this would be the AdHoc projects. And, when you think about it, that’s really the only way it could be. Considering that the other three categories are an accepted part of what has to be done every week, in order to get work done in one of these categories I would have to take from the other. And the data showed just that.
Month-to-Month time breakdown
Week-to-week time breakdown
Just by looking at these graphs you can see that the data is validating some of the hypothesis. With the week-to-week graph you can see that there were times when My Project Work would completely go away and others when AdHoc Project Work would disappear. That was rarely the case with the other categories. And you can see that these other three categories stayed relatively constant which also validates the hypothesis.
Further data analysis also validates this. Although the mean amount of time that was spent on these tasks was essentially the same (this is reflected in the breakdown where they were all near 20%) the standard of deviation was very different. The standard of deviation (per week) for the three non-project related categories were 2:46, 3:02, and 2:45. Adhoc Project work had a weekly standard of deviation of 5:09 and My Project works standard of deviation was 5:46! This showed definitively that my hypothesis was right, time was mostly stolen from My Projects to feed the AdHoc projects.
So was this how nothing got done? Well, yes. I could clearly tell that this was why I had a difficult time with getting “something” (my projects) done. The Klok data also gave insight to how I could be more efficient in organizing how I spent my day and the inefficiencies of doing multiple projects concurrently versus serially, etc. Oh yeah… and I also had to figure out what to do about AdHoc Projects stealing from My Projects! But that’s for next time…
