I’ve never been big on writing things down. In college, I loved the classes that I had with Ann because I could copy her notes the day before a test and use those to study. If she wasn’t in my class, I’d have to find some other girl to let me copy her notes. I got to be pretty good at judging how good someone’s notes were during class so that I knew who to ask. Because if I was stuck using only the notes that I had taken… I was in big trouble.

A secondary issue for me is that I can get a little bit off track sometimes. I’ll have a task to complete – and I’ll somehow end up doing something far less important. Then Ann will come home and ask me how my day went and I will wonder how I didn’t get that thing done. So today I was going to do something about both of those weaknesses – I was going to keep track of how I spent all of my time. I made a little spreadsheet and journaled every 15 minutes what I had been doing. I was really not looking forward to this – it seemed like it was going to be a huge pain. But it ended up being pretty amazing.

I’m really not sure that I have had a more productive day in a really, really long time. Because I was writing down all that I was doing, I didn’t want to waste any time. So I didn’t. I flew through task after task. I read my Bible this morning. I finished a couple of things for an event that we have coming up with a networking group that I’m in. I finished three pages of my website that I had been struggling with for a week. I followed up with a couple of prospects for work.  I had the boys do a little workout after school. I got the floors vacuumed and steam cleaned. I got some laundry done. I got my little video studio set up and shot and edited a video. Got my video studio all put-away. And I did the dishes. Throw in the fact that I take the boys to school and pick them up from school, that’s a pretty productive day.

Takeaways from today:

I don’t know that I could take the pressure of doing this every day – feeling like I could not stop to rest at all because it would be wasting time. But now, on a day when I have a lot to do, I know to journal my time to become super-productive Kurt. There was no stopping to check Facebook or Twitter. There was no reading any soccer news. There was no time for any of my regular time wasters because I did not want to write down that I was wasting time doing them. It would have been like admitting defeat. So, if you need to have a productive day, journal your time.