As you become a time investor you need a source of encouragement.
After you have worked on a project for a while it is easy to lose track of the progress you have made. Sometimes this fact can lead to discouragement and the feeling of getting stuck or slowed down. Now is the time you need to realize that you have made progress.
One tool that can help you track your progress is a Time Investment Ledger. Tracking time helps you see its impact on the big picture. With the ledger, I can quickly write down brief points about my day. This activity is very brief. Here is a sample of one day’s activity.
Time Investment Ledger
Week: 5 Day: 4
| The goal for the week: to develop a brochure that can help Customer Service deal with complaints and concerns by answering some of the recent questions about our product; can be used as a physical and/or e-brochure. | ||||
| Transitional Activity | Time | Invested Time | Accomplishment | |
| 1. Walk to work | 12 minutes | 8 minutes | Planned 2 steps of the project. | |
| 2. Waiting at the doctor’s office | 20 minutes | 15 minutes | Thought of three ways to answer a customer’s question. | |
| 3. Shower | 5 minutes | 3 minutes | Developed a brief outline for a brochure. | |
| Total Time Invested: | 26 minutes | |||
| Most Significant Achievement: | Dealt successfully with a customer complaint by thinking through different approaches to their question. | |||
| Most Significant Result: | Retained a customer. | |||
Keep copies of your Time Investment Ledger and review them weekly and/or monthly to celebrate your progress. Also, you can keep a running tab on how much time you have been able to invest in the project overall.
Many days you will only be able to log a few entries. In the example here there was only a 26-minute investment that day. Those small investments begin to build on one another. Let’s say for example that, during a two-week period, you could invest that same amount for ten days. Your investment would be four hours and twenty minutes. Wow! A lot more than the zero that is invested now.
If you could continue this pattern for 12 months, it would add up to over 112 hours! You would have an investment of almost three 40 hour work weeks. That amount of investing in yourself will pay off!
Seeing the development tracked on the ledger will be a source of great encouragement.
Happy Investing in You!
Here is a link to a blank ledger that you can use as a template.
http://timeinvestor.net/time-investment-ledger-template/
Comment below how the Ledger is an encouragement to you.