Hey, Kyle. I have a question about metric tracking. I have been tracking deep work metrics day by day in my time block planner based on the number of hours I'm working. And I'm finding that hours is not a granular enough metric. Some mornings I might work one hour on a project, and other mornings I might work an hour and a half.

And I'm finding that the 30 minutes really makes a big difference in how much I accomplish, but that it's hard to track. I am using the tallies, and so I can only track an integral number of hours worked. Tracking minute by minute seems potentially too granular. I shouldn't really care whether I work 20 or 21 minutes, because it might require a stopwatch or something like that.

And so I'm wondering, how should I go about tracking deep work time in my time block planner? What is too granular? What is not granular enough? And how should I differentiate between 60 and 90 minutes of work on a given day? Well, there's two things at play here. How to track time, like what granularity to track time at, and then the bigger question of should you track time?

Should you track how much time specifically you've spent on different projects? So if we go to the first question, let's assume we want to track time on a given project. Let's say we want to track deep work time, or whatever it is you're trying to track. The right granularity is probably 30-minute increments, because that's the granularity, the smallest granularity of the time block planner.

You have hour-long blocks that are split into 30-minute sub-blocks. And so that would typically be the granularity on which I would track. The way I would actually capture that when I was doing deep work tallies, if it ended up on a 30-minute multiple, like it ended up on 3 and 1/2 hours, I would draw a hash mark that was half the height of the other ones.

So you could actually have a half. Now, one of the nice things about time block planning is you should format different blocks different ways. So let's say what you want to tabulate is how long you spent on deep work. You should, like I do, for example, I color in a deep border, a thick border, around my deep work block.

So now when I glance at my schedule, I can actually just see visually how much deep work did I do that day. Oh, there was a two-hour block here and a 30-minute block there. It almost makes putting the metrics redundant, though it is nice to kind of have a number up there.

So that's the other thing I would recommend. The bigger point I want to make, however, is that I find myself doing less hour tracking of that type, less so than I used to. So it used to be one of my main metrics was deep work hours. I wanted to see how much of it I was doing.

Multiscale planning, when embraced fully, makes that also a little bit unnecessary. So if you have a vision that informs a quarterly plan, that informs your weekly plan, and that weekly plan then informs your daily plan, you're putting aside the right amount of time for those things for that week.

You are doing that during the weekly planning process. It's when you have a book you're working on. You're looking at your week and figuring out, when do I actually want to work on that book? I want to spend all day Tuesday morning because that's free. And then I'm going to do an hour after work on Thursday, hour after work on Friday.

Whatever it is, you're making a plan that makes the most sense for the reality of your schedule and for what's actually important on your plate. And then when you get to each day, you're using that weekly plan to build your actual time block plan. I find when I'm really leaning into multiscale planning, I don't really need to know how many hours of deep work that I do.

That's an important leading indicator if you're not giving a lot of thought to how your week is going to shape up. So it's a inducement. Hey, make sure you get deep work hours in if you can, because you want that number to be not too small. And I get that.

But the next level of sophistication I found is that when you really trust yourself to go from vision to quarter to week to day, you gave a lot of thought to what the right amount of deep work is. And if you're actually executing your daily plans, that work is getting executed.

So you don't also need to track it, because guess what? Some weeks are going to have much smaller amount of deep work than others. Some weeks are going to be really leaning into something logistical. Other weeks, the whole thing will be dedicated to deep work. And the individual number might not be that important.

So that's the bigger point I want to make here is I do like tracking deep work hours. I used to do that, but I don't anymore. Because if you're doing multi-scale planning properly, you don't need to be forcing yourself or inducing yourself or motivating yourself to do work with those particular metrics.

Really, the only metric that matters is, did I follow my plan? Did I look at my weekly plan and actually build out and follow a time block plan? So maybe that will alleviate some of the concern you're having about accurately capturing all the different places you do deep work.

If you trust your plan, you can trust that you're getting the right amount of work done. (upbeat music)