Do you sometimes look back at your week and experience a sinking feeling because you failed to accomplish as much as you had planned and hoped? Whether building a professional career or operating your own business, time is your most valuable asset and your income is directly impacted by how you schedule your time. Time is a commodity you can not buy; there are a finite number of hours in each day and the clock is always ticking away. Sometime ago, I found a simple, effective system that permits me to nearly triple my productivity and I’ll share some of the practical ideas which you can implement right away to increase your productivity without working longer hours or working harder than you do currently.

Maintain a Time Log.
In order to better manage your time, you must learn how you are currently spending time. An effective way to do this is to keep a detailed time log. After logging your activities and time for a single day, you’ll gain a great deal of insight into where you time is being used. Simply measuring time is often sufficient to raise your awareness of unconscious habits so that you can scrutinize them and make changes.

Here’s how to maintain a detailed time log: During your day, note the time you begin an activity and list the activity. Record the time you stop the activity. You may want to use a stop watch but simply noting times on your watch or a clock works just fine also. You may want to measure your time usage only during your work day or you may choose to log your time throughout your entire day. After measuring your time for the day, sort the times into general categories to learn the percentage of your valuable time being spent on various types of activity. Categories from your work day might include items such as reading/writing email, phone calls, chatting with coworkers, bathroom breaks, attending meetings, customer service, and other broad categories. To be really thorough, keep a very detailed log for a full week and check the percentages spent on various categories during the week. You’ll probably find you have 50-100 time log entries each day.

You may well learn that you are spending only a small amount of your working hours performing tasks which are actually productive work. Studies show the average office employee only performs productive work about 1.5 hours each day! The rest of the time is spent eating, taking breaks, socializing, shuffling papers, carrying on non-business communication, and many other tasks totally unrelated to productive work. On average, the full-time 8-5 office employee begins doing real work around 11:00 am and starts to wind down their efforts by 3:30 pm or before. Clearly, keeping a time log will help you realize how much more you can accomplish by simply working on business-related tasks during your work day.

Analyze Your Time Log
When I first keep a log of my time, I found I only performed 15 hours of productive work during a week in which I spent 60 hours at the office! While I was actually about twice as productive as the average office employee, I was stunned when I learned the results. What happened to those 45 hours? The time log explained exactly where the time had gone. While I hadn’t been away of it, I was draining my time by checking email much too often, being overly perfection-oriented about tasks which really didn’t even need to be accomplished, spending far too much time reading the news, allowing myself to be interrupted needlessly far too often and for too long, taking too many breaks and too long for meals, and similar time-eating activities.

Calculate Your Ratio of Personal Efficiency
After realizing I had only worked 15 hours of the 60 hours I was in the office, I began questioning myself. I realized my income as well as sense of accomplishment depended on just 15 hours, not the 60 hours spend at the workplace. I began recording my daily efficiency ratio by dividing the amount of time spent at the workplace by the total amount of productive work time. This ratio can be expressed as: Efficiency Ration = Time Doing Productive Work divided by Time at Workplace. I was disturbed to learn I was only 25% efficient! Staying at work more hours would not improve this ratio. I had to change my use of my time.

Cut Back on Total Hours, Force an Increase in Efficiency
Have you ever tried to discipline yourself to perform tasks you really were not motivated to do? I’m sure you have and you probably failed. This is the same thing that happened when I attempted to discipline myself to work harder. Trying harder, in fact, de-motivated me and my efficiency ratio fell even further. I decided to try the opposite approach so the next day I only allotted myself five hours at the office and I would not work the rest of the day. A very interesting thing happened: my brain got the idea that work time was very scarce and I found I worked nearly all of the five hours, achieving an efficiency ratio above 90%! For the rest of the week I continued my experiment and found I accomplished real work for almost 25 hours of the 30 hours I spent in my office, making my efficiency ratio over 80% for the week. I had cut my time at the office by half (60 hours down to 30 hours) while getting more than 10 hours more real work accomplished. If your time log indicates a low efficiency ratio, try the same method I used by cutting your working time severely for a day. You’ll be surprised to see how your brain shifts into thinking time is scarce and you will suddenly become much more efficient because you must be. With tight time constraints, you will almost always find a way to accomplish all your work. When you have plenty of time, being inefficient is easy.

Slowly Increase Total Hours But Maintain Peak Efficiency
Over a period of time — several weeks — I was able to maintain an efficiency ratio over 80% as I slowly increased my office time. I’ve now maintained this for many years and I usually get 40 hours of productive work accomplished while spending only around 45 hours in my office. This is the optimal work week for me. If I spend more time in the office, my efficiency ratio drops quickly. This system lets me optimize my effective while allowing me to create a wonderful balance in all areas of my life — professional as well as personal. By tripling my business productivity, I gained lots of time to spend quality time with family and friends and pursue personal interests.

Logging your time is a smart way to achieve optimal productivity without working longer hours. You’ll only need to keep a time log periodically to gain the benefits of the system. Now I log my time for one week every 3 to 6 months or any time I notice a drop in my productivity. These past years, this system has made a vast difference for me and has provided me with new distinctions and a reputation as a can-do employee. If I go for too long without time logging, I notice my productivity slowly falls back because I unconsciously fall back into time-wasting habits.

Time logging is a simple system but is a high leverage activity requiring little time and effort to perform. The long-term payoff is huge. You’ll find you enjoy your work much more and have much more time for activities outside the workplace while still accomplishing all your responsibilities at work.