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What Time Tracking Granularity Do You Recommend?


Chapters

0:0 Cal's Intro
0:10 Cal reads a question about time tracking granularity
0:20 Cal explains it as 30 minutes
1:30 Cal explains some nuances of the Time-Block Planner

Transcript

Alright, we got a question now from Mika, who asks, "What time tracking granularity would you recommend?" 30 minutes. I think the smallest granularity with which you want to do any time block planning is 30 minutes. Once you're below 30 minutes, you should just batch whatever you're doing into a collection of activities that takes 30 minutes.

Once you get below 30 minutes, you're getting too fine grained. There's no way that you're actually going to hit those blocks consistently. What's the point? So this is why you'll see in my time block planner, for example, 30 minutes is the smallest granularity that I've demarcated for actually drawing out time blocks, and that's the way to do it.

Quick technical tip for accomplishing that, because if you're time blocking on a planner, that 30 minute block might be small, physically small, right? It doesn't take up much space. So if you're putting five small things into a 30 minute block, you're probably not going to be able to record those five things in a 30 minute size block in your time block planner.

So the advice I give in the front of the planner, where I have a sort of mini dissertation on time block planning, is you instead put a number in that 30 minute block. Put a number 1 and circle it. And then in the upper right of your time block planning grid, you draw the 1 up there, and then right next to it you can have the list of everything that's supposed to go in that block.

Oh, here's the five things. 1, 2, 3. And you put it up in the upper right of your time block grid because your time block plan, even as you correct it as time goes on, gets lower and lower and lower. It looks like a downwards facing slope. So the upper right of your time block grid is unlikely to actually be space that you need for corrected time block plans.

So you put it up there and so you can elaborate a lot of little things that are supposed to happen in a small block. So don't go less than 30 minutes, just put more into those 30 minute blocks.