So yesterday I completed my one week 'time audit', as announced last Monday. I decided to do the time audit to give myself a clearer idea of how long my regular tasks take me during the week - and where I can make improvements.

The tracker - I used the previously mentioned ActivityTracker gadget for the iGoogle home page. Full marks for ease of use - I just had to punch in and out of each activity as I went about my day. You can set the Tracker to issue a sound alert at a specified interval if you have trouble remembering to log in and out. This has the added benefit of being a regular reminder to get back on track with what you were *supposed* to be doing if you've gotten off track.

Having to log my activities was a good motivator to stay focused - watching my 'break time' and 'warcraft time' add up during the week spurred me back to work several times. It also showed me how much I multi-task each day. It's quite hard to track your activities when you have several things on the go each once or get pulled into finishing something urgently.

The data - one feature which Activity Tracker lacked which I would have quite liked is a way to save and compare different weeks. It can show you your total hours for the week and break them down into activities, and can even show them in a graph format for you, but I'd really like to be able to compare week on week. I guess I'd need a more sophisticated tracker for that.

The results - Looking at my results for the week I have two goals - to reduce my breaktime during work hours, and to work at reducing how long it takes me to complete regular tasks.

So did you complete a time audit last week, or have you done one in the past? What did you learn from it? Answers in comments please!

Tags: au | keep yourself honest | lifehacker challenge | productivity | time management | timer | tracker