I still keep timesheets at work. No one has asked me to do this. No one is checking them. And yet, there I am, at the end of every working week, regular as clockwork, filling them out with precision and accuracy.

I know what you’re thinking, and I’m sorry.

Throughout my career, I’ve heard countless protests about the inconvenience of tracking and recording our time. Billable or unbillable – who cares? Who gives a crap? We work as hard as our clients demand. Why bother tracking any of this nonsense?

At one PR agency, I remember a particularly unhappy colleague being reprimanded for failing to submit a single timesheet over a nine-month period. Claiming it was necessary for client invoicing purposes (it wasn’t), our Finance Director eventually forced him to go back and record every missing entry. Here was a man who could barely remember what he’d done yesterday, let alone 40 weeks ago. Now there’s a waste of time for you.

By contrast, I’ve never had a problem with filling in timesheets. It’s not my favourite thing to do, but most of the things I do fail to rank anywhere on my bucket list – that’s how life works. Besides, if I spent all my time doing my favourite thing, I’d probably get bored.

I continue to keep timesheets because it keeps me honest – reminding me that I need to do a certain amount of work each day and making me perversely proud when I see that I’ve gone my contracted hours, because apparently I’m the sort of person that gets a kick out of doing extra work for free.

But it’s also interesting to know precisely where the time goes. This is true in life as well as work.

Take social media as an example. The average person spends two and a half hours a day on social media.

Now that’s a lot of time – roughly equivalent to my sitting down and watching Martin Scorsese’s 2006 epic ‘The Departed’. Except that on a quality-of-time metric, it’s not equivalent at all. The more honest equivalent would be sitting down and watching ‘Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace’, which clocks in at two hours and 15 minutes, before spending the remaining quarter of an hour punching myself in the face.

Far be it from me to tell anyone how they should or shouldn’t occupy their leisure time. But I’d wager that most people have no idea how much of their time is spent sub-optimally. If we all kept personal timesheets, as well as our professional logs, we’d be able to assess where our time was going with far greater clarity, and make better-informed value judgements.

A friend recently shared a screengrab showing that he’d amassed almost 13 days’ playing time on an Xbox game that only came out ten weeks ago. Now I’ve done some rudimentary calculations based on my knowledge of his work schedule and sleep regime. And I can estimate that, since the game was released, it has occupied around 43% of his total available leisure time.

This seems like poor time allocation, in my view. But again, who am I to say? At least he’s tracking his time. And he probably views it as a wiser investment than my decision to write about timesheets.

Photo by Zoltan Tasi on Unsplash