Every now and then I meet someone who tells me that they “absolutely have no time” or “feel as if their days are running away from them”. Sometimes it is a mother who feels she spends all day busy but can never quite explain what she was busy with. Sometimes it is a business owner who works from morning until night and still feels behind. Sometimes it is a woman approaching retirement who suddenly realises that years have passed while she was constantly waiting for “when things calm down.”
The feeling is usually very similar. They describe themselves as exhausted, overwhelmed and permanently short of time, yet when asked what exactly they did most of their day, the answer is often surprisingly vague.
Interesting thing is that we have a story about how we spend our time. We believe we know where our energy goes, what occupies our thoughts and what our priorities are. But the reality is that the stories we tell ourselves are not always entirely accurate. Our memory by it’s nature is selective, emotions colour our recollections and we tend to remember what we focus on to remember rather than what actually happened.
A few months ago I started recommending a simple exercise to some of my clients. It requires no special skills, no expensive apps and no complicated preparation. It is almost embarrassingly simple. I call it a One-Day Time Revision.
How The One-Day Time Revision Works
1. Choose one completely ordinary day, not a holiday, not a particularly productive day, just an ordinary workday day.
2. Set an alarm to ring every 15 minutes from the moment you wake up until you fall asleep.
3. Every time the alarm goes off, quickly write down exactly what you are doing at that moment. Not what you intended to be doing, nor what you planned to be doing, not what you wish you were doing instead. Just the fact, let’s say: “Answering work emails”; “Scrolling social media”; “Driving”; “Cooking”; “Looking for lost keys”; “Writing”; “Watching TV”; “Talking on the phone” – you got it right?
The note takes only a few seconds, the important thing is not to judge the activity. The goal is simply to collect information.
4. Then, the next day, sit down with your notes and group your activities into let’s say: family or friends related tasks; work and career related; time burners (scrolling; tv binging); self care or health related, anything that you see can be grouped looking for patterns.
5. Then simply by how many tasks fall under each group analize how much of the day was spent on activities that actually support your goals? How much was spent reacting to other people’s needs? Does the day reflect the day you were think you were living? And now my favourite question of all: if somebody had to describe you based solely on the activity you were doing most often during that day, what would you be called?
Would you be called
A manager?
A problem-solver?
A driver?
A student?
A social media consumer?
And even more importantly, would you like that description about yourself?
This one-day time revision task may sound simple, but it is actually built upon several well-established psychological approaches. Researchers have been using forms of self-monitoring, time-use sampling and Experience Sampling Methods from 1982. The basic principle is that when we record experiences in real time, we are able to see a much more accurate picture than when we rely on memory alone.
One of the reasons these methods are so valuable is that they often show the gap between our intentions and our real actions. Life always fills our days with small requests, obligations, interruptions and habits that seem insignificant but become surprisingly big if we put them together and give a look how things, that we never planned doing, took over things that we had. We may genuinely believe that family was our highest priority, while our time records show that most of our energy went doing chores, because “nobody else will do it for us”.
We may believe we’re focused on our business, while our day shows endless distractions or assisting other people to do their jobs. We might think we were writing all day, and yet, we just scrolled half of it and we called it “searching for inspiration”. Reality is often more interesting than the story we tell ourselves.
The Writer Who Couldn’t Find Time to Write
I remember suggesting this exercise to a client, a 65-year-old writer, who repeatedly told me that she is crazy behind her schedule. She loved writing, identified strongly as a writer and constantly worried about her unfinished projects. Yet she also felt constantly busy and could never understand why the script she was working on takes so long to finish.
When we reviewed her one-day log, the picture became clear. Only about twenty percent of her recorded activities involved writing, time wise 20% of her day is +-2 hours. While around forty percent of her day was spent helping other people. Some of that help was online, some over the phone and some involved becoming personally involved in solving logistical problems that were not really hers to solve. Another thirty percent of the day was occupied by household responsibilities, and approx ten percent involved activities related to her own wellbeing and self-care.
She found found difficult to say no when somebody needed help, but what she had not realised was that helping others had become the central activity of her day. She kept telling herself that she had no time to write, when in reality she was spending much of her time making other people’s lives easier.
Don’t get me wrong, that realisation is not intend to produce guilt, only to give clarity. Once she faces the real numbers, she can make conscious decisions about whether it reflected the life she wanted to live and if not, how to swap the numbers to the writing’s favour. We are not what we think we are; we are what we spend our time on.
The same approach can be used for health and wellbeing. People frequently say they always feel weak, always feel tired or always lack energy. Yet when they begin monitoring themselves throughout the day, they often discover that the reality is a bit different. They may wake up feeling sluggish and gain energy later in the morning. They may notice a consistent energy crash in the afternoon when they skip lunch. They may discover that certain interactions drain them far more than physical activity ever does.
Without monitoring, these patterns remain hidden beneath our assumptions and memories.
I didn’t Invented This Method, It Is a Well-Established Psychological Method
Psychologists have long used techniques such as self-monitoring, time-use sampling, and Experience Sampling Methods (ESM) to understand what people are really doing throughout the day. Instead of asking someone to remember how they spent their time, which is very unreliable, researchers use alarms or prompts throughout the day to collect real-time observations. Researchers such as Franzoi used electronic timers to prompt participants to record their experiences in real time. Similar methods are now widely used in psychology, behavioral science, habit research, and well-being studies.
The reason the One-Day Time Revision is so useful is simple: there is often a significant gap between what we think we do and what we actually do.
But If I Know I’m Monitoring My Time, The Results Will Not Be Accurate
Good point, even some psychologists have argued that self-monitoring is not entirely accurate because observing ourselves changes our behaviour. In research this is known as reactivity. People may become more productive, more organised or more mindful simply because they know they are being observed. My response is that this criticism misses two important points. First, if greater awareness encourages positive change, that is useful information rather than a flaw. It tells us that paying attention matters. So if we can be way more productive on this day, we can do exact thing tomorrow again!
Second, most people discover very quickly that maintaining perfect awareness every fifteen minutes for an entire day is harder than they expected. They may begin the morning on their very best behaviour, but by midday real life has usually taken over. Children need something, phones ring, unexpected problems arise and other people continue behaving exactly as they always do because they have no idea that an experiment is taking place. Normal habits kick in and the day becomes a fairly accurate reflection of your everyday life.
Perhaps that is why I like this exercise so much. It is simple enough that almost anybody can do it, practical enough to produce meaningful information and interesting enough that people often learn something genuinely unexpected about themselves.
I usually recommend doing it only once every 4-6 months. Think of it as taking a baseline measurement of your life. A reality check. An opportunity to see whether your days are moving in the direction you want them to go. What if the fastest way to change your future, is not by making another manifestation board, but by simply observing your present? Because while goals you declare to yourself sounds big and cool, it is your ordinary Tuesdays that actually shape your life!
If you decide to try this one-day time revision exercise, email me, I’d love to hear what you discover!
