Not long ago, I mentioned in my personal podcast “21 Years of Reviewing Freelance Work, 5 Cognitive Changes” that the reason why I can maintain the habit of self-reviewing comes from the long-term habit of recording the time consumption of a day in a table .
I have an excel to record what I do every hour of every day, from high school paper, university excel to online excel after work, for more than 10 years.
Opening the form is something I never tire of, so my friends often say that I am a form control.
One after another, some friends were inspired by this habit and came to share with me the joy they started to record. I felt the sense of accomplishment of pushing the pit, so I wrote down the method of how to reset the time and the iteration logic of the table in more detail for mutual communication. &refer to.
Let me take my 2021 annual form as an example to roughly present the time form.
| 2021 | How much did you earn this year? | |
| How long have you worked this year? | ||
| What do you do when you are not working? | ||
| What downward-rooted skills have been added? | ||
| What horizontal expansion skills have been added? | ||
| How many manuscripts are produced? | ||
| How many short stories are produced? | ||
| How many podcasts are produced? | ||
| sports? | ||
| social contact? | ||
| study? | ||
| Thought & Mindset Change? | ||
| 2022 | 2022 financial goals? | |
| 2022 creative goals? | ||
| 2022 output target? |
平常有在记时间表格的话，盘年度总结就很快。
将过往的时间投入量化并且做成图表，就能非常直观看见自己的表现，搭配自己的体感和实际产出，就能清晰看见自己的兴趣和技能点所在。
There are not too many beautiful forms in this article, the main focus is on developing the idea of ”paying attention to where your time is spent”. After all, time is a person’s most important asset!
Below, enjoy~
1. How long is my timetable?
After deducting 8-10 hours of sleep per day, there are at least 14-16 hours a day at our disposal, but I am a goldfish brain, and I often forget what I did yesterday after today , so write everything down for easy review. That’s why I mainly need timetables.
1. Daily record
At present, I use 06:00-24:00 as the vertical axis and the date as the horizontal axis. I open a new sheet every month and change a file every year. The method here is very simple, just pull it horizontally and vertically.
| wed | thu | fri | sat | the sun | |
| December 1 | December 2 | December 3 | December 4th | December 5 | |
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When it comes to what I do every hour, I will use 4 characters to simply write down what I am doing that hour, and divide it into three categories according to my personal lifestyle: output (work and creation)/ input / play (social and sports, etc.) , represented by different colors.
With the color identification, after each week passes, you can roughly know what your status is this week at a glance .
It is best for everyone to classify time according to their own living conditions. The three colors I have left are also the result of multiple iterations. There is no need to completely copy homework in the classification.
2. Weekly summary
According to the color classification of time investment, you only need to spend 5 minutes a day to record what you do in a day , add up or average by category every week, month, and quarter, and you can see your long-term state through the range of ebb and flow , and infer your upper limit, progress, and set goals for the next round.
| week/hr | Work | creation | enter | sports | social contact |
| 1 | 28 | 15 | 7 | 1 | 3 |
| 2 | 33 | 8 | 9 | 2 | 7 |
| 3 | 29 | 12 | 11 | 2 | 4 |
| 4 | 41 | 7 | 6 | 1 | 2 |
The above units are hours, and there are separate sections for income and output quantification, so I won’t post it if it has nothing to do with time.
With the weekly time quantification record, it takes only one minute to draw the chart at the beginning of the article. With the comparison of income and output performance, you can reverse the plan from the results and adjust your life to your ideal state step by step.
However, since purely digital records will be less humane, I will record the breakthroughs in behavior in the “Weekly Small Breakthrough” column, as well as the gratitude column & achievement column . Looking at it in this way, I can basically restore what I experienced at that time What, what thoughts and states do you have.
2. What is the purpose of the time table?
For me, the time table is mainly to help me correct the bias of subjective impression in memory .
We all often exaggerate or distort part of the memories in the memories over and over again, or say that we like to do something very much, but in fact we only do it once a month.
How much time we spend doing one thing is an objective number, which is more reliable than lip service or memory amplification, and it can also help us make more rational judgments when looking back and looking ahead.
Taking me personally as an example, many friends said that I have written more things after the naked speech (you can click to view the review of the naked speech ).
As a result, the review at the end of the year found that the number of articles produced in the first half of the year before and after the naked speech was the same, and the annual output after the naked speech was similar to that of the working hours, but after the naked speech, a lot of time was added to write short stories, and such a time investment ratio, after Form validation is sustainable.
So, the timetable helped me correct my self-perception . I’m not as good as I thought (laughs), but it showed me what my state and performance were like when I was efficient, and it helped me make life decisions with actual data as a basis. refer to.
3. My time record iteration history
Many friends look forward to finding a suitable time recording method for themselves on the first try . Regarding this point, what I want to share is that my time table has been recorded since the second year (or third year) of high school, and I have gone through several evolutionary processes──
1. High school: only records and no need for review, used up several MUJI paper forms
In order to prepare for the college entrance examination, I had an expectation of how many things I would watch every hour every hour, and I made myself stick to the plan. So the form is filled with the progress of different subjects such as “Geography Chapter X” and “Mathematical Simulation Questions”.
Life in high school is very simple. You need to check the progress every week and every month, and you just need to follow it every day. There is no need for review. In my impression, I wrote down a few MUJI khaki books like this.
2. University: too many activities, Excel is gradually overwhelmed by bells and whistles
After college, activities have become very diverse. It is very important to write down who and what to do every day. Since I have my own computer, I record it on excel, with time as the vertical axis and date as the horizontal axis, and the line changes every week.
At that time, I started to try color classification, but because the activities were too complicated, there were too many colors , and I didn’t organize them properly. Therefore, it was difficult to quantify what I was doing during this time, which is a pity. But I can also understand myself at the time, maybe I didn’t want to bind myself with secular numbers. People grow up in stages.
3. Work: Online Excel
After 2019, I figured out several online office tools commonly used by migrant workers, and changed Excel into an online document, so that both mobile phones and computers can record simultaneously, greatly increasing the convenience.
When reviewing at the end of 2020, I found that I write a lot of goals, to-dos, and record time every year, but why are there still many things that have not been achieved (or even started) by the end of the year? Only then did I really realize the importance of goals & process quantification & classification , so I set detailed quantitative goals for 2021 and split them into weeks. Now looking back at the 2021 annual summary, it is still effective.
4. Why do you like to record time?
- Every time I open the form and see a row of brightly colored ones, I feel very safe , although my friends often say that I am abnormal
- Use favorite colors , not only at a glance, but also visual incentives, thus increasing the motivation to open form records
- Love the feeling of making plans & seeing yourself walking on them. I am a person whose ideas change quickly. If there is no reminder on the form, I will spend a lot of unnecessary time making decisions and doubting my own decisions every day.
- It is also a happy thing to design the form template according to your own needs. I remember that when I was a child, I tried many calendar templates on the market, but none of them met the needs and were not smooth to use, so I had no motivation to keep memorizing them.
Forms hardly ever give me pain.
In addition to the excessive splitting of goals in the first half of 2021, which caused a bit of pressure, when I opened the form for a few days, I felt that I was not very happy, so I quickly deleted the goals and sections that were too detailed.
Only by protecting your love for a thing can you stick to it.
5. Is it time-consuming to make a timetable?
If you decide to build your own framework and list your goal plan, you may spend 1-2 hours in the early stage to build the framework.
After you have a framework, you only need to memorize it for 5 minutes every day , because it will look very rich after memorizing, and this positive feedback should motivate you to persevere. If you memorize it every day, it takes about 10 minutes to replay every week, and it is actually the same every month and every season. If you just pull the chart and don’t write your thoughts, it’s really fast. Occasionally iterate the table, and it can be done within about 1 hour. The annual summary is about 2 hours, and the main time will be spent on deciding which dimensions to use to examine yourself.
The time-consuming part is the thinking and reorientation of the personal direction , and this motif is basically something that everyone must spend time exploring. The table can serve as a reference for the coordinate system of life, but it cannot dominate the scene.
6. Who is more suitable to use the time table?
Although I am a firm believer in tables, as mentioned above, the problems that tables can solve are limited.
If you have:
- I can’t remember what I was doing last week
- Set a goal and never implement it
- Eager to understand and master the rhythm of your own life
Then you can try to make your own schedule, or see if there are any calendar templates on the market that meet your needs.
If you tend to look for existing templates in the market, my personal suggestion is to first think about where you want to set goals and track execution (ex. the three color classifications above), and then look for templates, otherwise many templates are really fancy. Sometimes the focus is blurred.
If you have a good memory and high mobility, you don’t need to spend extra time on forms, just enjoy your current life!
I hope that this article has clarified my love for the timetable. If there are any omissions or parts that you want to discuss further, welcome to communicate on WeChat (id: iwei_chu).
I wish you all the best in spending your time happily and productively!
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