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Dear diary, where is my time going each week?

Published about 1 year ago • 7 min read

How long does it take you roughly to complete XYZ task?

I ask this question to every single client I work with, and very often to our Alt Marketing School students. Most time, all I can see is sheer panic in their eyes.

From guess-timating all the way to wildly underestimating, most of us truly do not know how long it takes us to complete a given task at a given time. This is because most of us suffer from planning fallacy.

The idea of “planning fallacy,” identified by the psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman in 1979, expresses how we vastly underestimate how long we’ll need to get something done.

This is something that most of us do, on any given day. It's very important to address it because if we want to get better at planning our weeks, coordinating work with others, or even use techniques like Pomodoro or time blocking, we need to know how we pace ourselves.

Today I share some of what I have personally learned (the hard way), so you will not make the same mistakes.

In summary

  • track your time for one day as a compass to help you become more aware of your time
  • choose a day free of commitments to fully focus on the tasks at hand
  • for extra help, use the Pomodoro Technique to track your time
  • after every single task, write down how much time did it take you
  • for more insights write down how do you feel at the end of that task

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Understanding time fallacy

If you are still reading on, it means you want to understand how well you can manage your time.

How long does it take you to complete repeating tasks? This can support you with making them as effective as possible for yourself.

If we are expected to work at a specific pace that doesn't match our own, we're not able to see how long it takes us to complete a potential project or task.

The current 'to-do list’ mentality is interlinked with the idea of time fallacy: how often do you struggle to complete the most important tasks and projects?

We're constantly chasing a variety of tasks that are small, simple to tick off, and beat the to-do list overwhelm (not sure if it’s a thing, but I’ll do with it).

A simple experiment to manage time like a pro

This sounds all very doom and gloom, but we can train ourselves to understand and plan our own time according to our rhythms.

I have a simple exercise for you that will help you shed some light on planning fallacy, and also feel more confident about the time that you're spending on a given project.

This is a very simple thing that you have to do. However, I would recommend you set out one day this week, to make it happen.

Ideally choose one day without meetings or other commitments, so you can focus on your tasks at hand. We tend to naturally rush even more when facing external commitments.

What I'm going to ask you, is to become your very own productivity guinea pig and start assessing your tasks throughout one given day.

The exercise is pretty simple: I want you to start writing down how long it takes you to complete a given task.

In this case, you want to use a to-do list to outline how many tasks you’d like to go through and incorporate a variety of repeat activities as well to start evaluating how much time they take out of your schedule.

Up for a challenge?

Before you start your first task I wanted to ask yourself, and write down how long do you think it will take you to complete a given task. This allows you to see for yourself the expectations that you have about the time that it's going to take you to commit to something.

Need some help with tracking? You can even help yourself by using the Pomodoro Technique and a Pomodoro app to track your time.

Once you're able to see that in front of your face, you can then forget about it and start with your project or task at hand. Don't worry too much about the time until you feel that you're done.

The reason why I asked you to do it for every single task on the day, including checking emails, updating your social media profiles, or maybe scrolling Twitter is that I wanted to start becoming aware of where your time is going.

What if instead of being a slave on a to-do list, we started blocking our time in an effective way that could allow us to then prioritise the things that we love the most?

To me, this is a great opportunity to flip the script when it comes to planning fallacy - and make it work for us, instead of against us.

It's interesting exercise, and it might bring up a lot of things that you were not expecting to learn about yourself. Give it a try. Make sure that you do this for a whole day.

After every single task, write down how much time did it take you. If you want to go the extra mile and get extra brownie points, even write down how do you feel at the end of that task.

Did you feel fulfilled, accomplished, rushed?

Start learning about your rhythms and be able to see, realistically, how many tasks can you complete on a given day, especially when you're free from any other commitment, and also how are you pacing yourself throughout the day.


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Appreciation corner

This week's appreciation post goes out to Emma York. A true cheerleader, she is such a delightful, bring human. We have not officially met yet, but her support and motivation (and honest passion for her work and clients) are something a lot of us can learn more from.

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The planning fallacy is nothing new.

However, especially for people coming from traditional 9-5 environments, understanding how to effectively utilise our time is not a skill we were taught.

We are used to be assigned tasks by managers or bosses. This means we have been constantly adapting to other people's rhythms, rather than our own.

This way, we are not able to fully understand what is the best way for us to work on any given project.

Reassess your expectations, what success means to you, as well as being able to truly realise what your rhythms look like.

Good luck!

P.S. if you are looking for more support, these are 3 ways I can help…

  1. Learn how to market with purpose and access weekly tactics here.
  2. Book a power hour session and get unstuck here.
  3. Reclaim time to focus your energy where it matters here.


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Alt Marketing School

Alt Marketing School is a newsletter and podcast teaching marketers how to market to hearts, not brains. Using psychology, impact and the latest frameworks to help you make a bigger impact online.

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