Alright, this is the time log spreadsheet that you can download below the video. And I'm open, I've opened it here in Google Drive or Google Sheets, you could use this you can use Excel, you may have a few little tweaks to make depending on formatting depending on which software you use. But I'm just gonna go over some of these basic instructions, and then all of these different tabs and reports that you can use down here at the bottom. This is pretty cool. So first, first thing you want to do is open up the projects and the categories tabs and type in your projects and categories. So let me explain what that is.

If you go to projects. These are all the different main areas of your life. For me, I've got family adventure summit and music teachers helper and you know, this course and a whole bunch of different projects that I'm working on. And you could break it out as detailed as you want. Or you could just keep it you know, work and play or family or whatever you want to use as your projects here. So you just type in a new project.

Let's say so so far I have sleep, everyone's got sleep. And I'll tell you why. How that is a project in a minute. When we get to categories, personal work, play, let's say we also have spouse, okay? You want to track specifically that your spouse project or really the time you spent with your spouse or at finding a spouse if you don't have one yet you want one. Okay, so then, after you enter in your projects, you can have up to 20 different projects.

I love to be able to make it infinite, but due to the nature of the spreadsheet and the reports, that's one limit I had to put on there. Let's go over two categories now. Categories are used for more of the specific tasks that you do throughout your day. For example, we have sleep, getting ready exercise, meditation, planning, email, reading, sex, leisure, whatever you want to put here. For the main test. This could be again, General task categories, or they could be specific tasks like I have one on there for shooting video.

Because I've done that a lot for this course. So that's one of my categories. Now, you may wonder why we need projects and categories. Well, for example, if you are writing an email, you might be writing an email for personal reasons. Or you might be writing a work email or an email for a specific project. And maybe you'll want to track how much time you're spending on that entire project or how much time you're spending an email for a specific project.

So that's why we have separate projects and categories just to allow you some more fine tuning. Now you'll notice I have sleep here again, that's because in the reports, it's helpful to be able to see how much time you spent in sleep, whether you're looking at a category report, or a project report. So I have that one in both. Alright, back to the instructions page. The next step is to go to the time log tab, and enter the Start time End time project category and any notes that you want to enter. This is really this time log tab.

This is where you're going to spend the majority of your time. This is the most The most interactive part of this spreadsheet. So here's what you do. Every time you want to log your time, you come in here, and you say, you know, today's January 1, or whatever day it is, you can sit and then when I what I usually do is I use the end time that was here before as my start time. And then from 735, to whatever time it is, now that you're entering the log, or if you're entering a few things at a time, you can put it to whatever time it is, but let's say to 8am it'll automatically calculate the duration, how long you spent on that task. And then what project were you working on?

Well, I was doing some work, and what category was it? I was doing email, and I wrote a letter to my boss or whatever. Okay, so basically, that's all there is to tracking your time. You go in here you enter the date, Start time, End time, project, category and notes. Now, rather than having to type out this date, ever Every single time, what I like to do is grab two of them. Because notice if you grab one of them, and drag, it will increment for you, you don't want that.

So grab two that are the same, you'll have to type it twice. And then just drag this down for as many tasks as you think you'll have today, as many time logs, and then you can go through and fill out the rest without having to enter the date. You'll notice the week column and the duration column are orange. And this indicates that it's a calculated field. It does things for you, you never have to enter those in. So this is the week number when you enter in something like you know, January 25.

It'll tell you that's the fourth week of the year, or November 1 is the 44th week of the year, etc. So that's all that is, and that's using some of the reports. Now one other reason that I think it's so powerful to use a log like this is because of the research that's been done around goals and goal achievement. There have been studies that have shown that people are almost two and Have more times likely to attain their goals when they regularly self monitor when you are reviewing and looking back at what you're doing in your life throughout your day throughout your week, and people who do that tend to develop more accurate plans and feel more motivated to follow through on the plants that they create. There was one study that reviewed like 138 different studies with like 19,000 people. And the researchers found that monitoring your progress is just as important to goal attainment as setting a clear goal in the first place.

In other words, if you set a goal for yourself, but you don't monitor or check back on it regularly or look at see to see how you're doing, you're so much less likely to achieve it. Okay, let's go back to the instructions tab and look at the third and final step, which is to visit the various reports tabs to get more data on how you're spending your days and weeks. Now if this is the first time you've done This there, you may see this little spreadsheet bug which, unfortunately, there's not much you can do about, but I'll show you how to fix it real quick. So if you go to the Daily Report tab, this is a report that shows you how you're spending your time on a daily basis. Now notice if there's the first time you may see this, where it says RTF. If you see that, it's just because of how the data is calculated.

When it's importing a new spreadsheet, just highlight the data underneath it, not the word ref, but this data underneath it, hit delete, and then it will fix itself now it's populated with your projects. And what you see here is you'll have the opportunity to select a date from any of the dates that you've entered on your time log. And it will show you how much time you spent in each of those projects. So seven hours 15 minutes and sleep 20 minutes of personal 25 minutes and work. And then it will show you how much time you spent in each of those projects in a bar chart. So if you click it, you can kind of hover over this in Google Spreadsheets Anyway, you can hover over and see how much time you spent on each of those items.

Then at the bottom, it shows you eight hours total we've logged. So if you're filling out 24 hours every day, then this will say 23 minutes, 59 or 2023 hours, 59 minutes. And if it's wrong, then you probably have a duplicate entry or you overlap some of the time. So you can just go ahead and look at that. Alright, and if you scroll down a little bit further on the daily report, you will be able to see similar data for categories. Now we have RF again there because it's the first time we've used a spreadsheet.

So just select the things below it, hit delete, fixes itself. And now you can see how much time you spent on each of the smaller tasks in the bar chart and in this chart here, and also a little pie chart showing the percentage of how much time you spent per category. We don't have much data in there now but obviously, we're spending a lot of time sleeping and not much time on the other two tasks that we have in our list, and then the total down here. So that is the daily. Alright, now if we go to the weekly report tab, it's very Very similar, the only difference is that we're showing data based on an entire week rather than a single day. So up at the top, you would select the week, right now we only have one week entered.

But if there were multiple weeks in this timeline, we'd be able to select those. And then it will give you a breakdown of how much you've spent, how much time you spent on every project and every category throughout the entire week, along with the same charts. So that's the weekly report. Now we have a few other reports that you may find helpful. And one of the reasons I really wanted to have a visual chart in this is because sometimes you look at the numbers and you're like, yeah, I spent, you know, seven hours sleep and I spent this much time on personal social work. But when you're just looking at the numbers that sometimes doesn't seek in as well as when you have this huge bar showing, here's how much time I'm working.

And then this tiny bar showing how much time I'm playing. And it helps you realize, wow, I need to maybe make an adjustment there. I think if you start using these and you especially if you fill it out for 24 seven, you're gonna get some amazing Using insights into how you spend your time. Now, sometimes you may go through these reports, and you'll look and say, Wow, you know, I'm, I'm really not spending as much time in this certain area as I want to. And it might feel disappointing to you. But this is this is the truth.

You know, if you're, if you're filling this out accurately, this is the truth about how you're spending your time. And you've got to face that you've got to face that truth. If you want to succeed. You've got to self monitor yourself in order to improve a lot of people. They're just living from one situation to another and reacting to whatever comes up. But sometimes the fastest way to get back into the game is to expect something of yourself again to realize that you've got the power to improve and you can do that.

Remember that you're stronger than you think. Don't hold yourself back. You can make improvements based on this date of it can have a huge significant impact in your life. All right now, let me show you a few of these additional reports that I think you'll also find useful. So first, we have a project report. This one allows you like the weekly report, just select a week.

And then you just type in the year there. And what this does is it takes all of your projects that you have, and the entire week for that project. And it calculates how much time you're spending on each project each day. And then over here on the right, it allows you to set a goal, how much time do you want to be spending on this project in a given week, and then it will tell you over here on the right how much you've hit the mark or how much time you have left in order to fill that. And if you scroll down to the bottom, it gives you the total how much time you spent on each task every day, and then another bar chart and then the category report does the same thing but with your categories. And then finally we have the category details report.

This one allows you to choose any category that you have entered in. And it shows you every single entry you've ever entered in that category. So for example, You know, if you notice you're spending a ton of time in leisure. This will help you see how you actually have spent the time, assuming you keep good notes. So you could notice that all your leisure time is spent watching movies, well, then you realize, okay, maybe first, maybe I need another category just for watching movies. Or maybe I need to cut back on a leisure time or do something else.

So that'll help you see where your time is going within a specific category. And that's basically the time log spreadsheet. And there are a few other tips I recommend at the bottom. First, be careful not to delete any cells that have a formula. Second, if you record your time for a full 24 hours a day, it gives you much more complete accuracy. Now if you have a time that overlaps a day, for example, let's say you go to sleep at 11pm and you wake up at 8am.

That's not going to work well as a duration. So you got to keep Remember, this is all for one day. So you'll end that at 11:59pm. And then you'll start the next day, January 2 At 12am, that makes sense. Oops, not pm AM. Okay, so that that's how you can get the full 24 hours in a day.

I also recommend you leave this spreadsheet open in your browser all day long. So if you if you right click on it in your browser, you can pin the tab. And that means it'll stay there in the front. And that would make it easy for you to just see that it's always there to remind you to keep going back to it. Or if you have a dual monitor system, maybe keep the spreadsheet open in another in your other monitor. So you're regularly looking back at and getting that reminder.

And another way to remind yourself is to set a timer on your phone to go out every 30 or 60 minutes to remind you to log your time. And when you're not at your computer and you don't have the spreadsheet handy, I recommend writing a note to yourself. So you can record the time when you switch tasks and then when you come back to the spreadsheet, you can fill it out and make sure everything is in there accurately. So for example, in the evenings when I'm hanging out with my family, I'll say we just Put Like in my phone in another spot or on a piece of paper, I ate dinner with them from this time to this time, and then we played this game from this time to this time, whatever it was, and then I'll come here and enter it in later. Finally, if you have a slower computer or you find the spreadsheet, the browser getting sluggish, I recommend perhaps making a fresh copy of the spreadsheet every month, then for optimal performance, because you're going to get hundreds and hundreds of entries if you're recording this fully 24 seven every day.

And it could give you some fantastic data. But if you start to see a performance decrease, you might not if you do, just make a fresh copy of it every month. And that'll help it keep running nice and fast. And then finally, once you're familiar with how to use the spreadsheet, you might want to for example, just put the time log over here at the front. So that's what opens up when you first open the spreadsheet then you don't have to have the instructions tab and wade through all these other sorts if that's the one you use the most are moving instructions all the way back to the back if you're familiar with them. But they're there for first time users to help you get familiar with it.

So that is the spreadsheet. I hope you see the power of this. I hope you like how it looks tried to make it a little prettier than a plain boring spreadsheet. But most of all, I hope you use it so that you can start seeing the benefits of tracking time in your life.