You have now defined your goals, but you need to know where your time is currently being spent. To find out, you will need to keep an Activity Log.

You can build an activity log by hand, but it's boring and hard to keep up. Fortunately, you can use Qlockwork to keep an activity log. Qlockwork gives you a more accurate activity log, without having to remember to keep it up-to-date.

Classifying Your Activities

To understand your time use, you need to classify each of the activities in your activity log by the type of goal they helped you achieve: "critical", "supportive" or "wish". Not all of your activities will match one of your defined goals, so you'll need two further categories: "personal" for non-work activities and "other" to cover any activities that are work-related but don't contribute to your goals.

Below, you will find out how to classify the data in your Qlockwork log.

Classifying Your Qlockwork Activity Log

In your Qlockwork calendar, you have a record of all the activities you did on your PC.

To classify your day, follow Steps 1-4.

Step 1: Open an activity item

Open the first activity of your day by double-clicking on it from the Qlockwork calendar view.

In the activity above, a Word document called "QWAdvisorGuide" was worked on.

Step 2: Classify the activity

Decide if the activity should be classified as critical, supportive, wish, personal or other.

Now pick your chosen value from the Project dropdown.

In the case above, if the activity was part of achieving a critical goal, you would choose the project "Critical".

Step 3: Move on to the next activity

Click on the down arrow to move to the next activity of your day.

In the picture below , the down arrow is highlighted and you can see its tooltip ("Next Item"). You'll be asked if you want to save your changes. Click "Yes".

The next activity will then appear. Repeat steps 2 and 3 until you have classified all your activities.

Step 4: Check you have classified all your activities

When your day is completely classified, it will look something like this

Fast Classification

It should take ten to fifteen minutes to classify your whole day following steps 1 to 4. You can speed the process up by setting rules to automatically classify your activities or by classifying several activities in one go.

Interpreting Your Day

Now that you have your whole day classified, you can find out how you spent your time.

Go to the Qlockwork menu and select "Create Activity Report". Choose to report "by project" on the day you have just classified. Now hit OK to generate the report.

Your aim is to spend on average:

• 70% of your time on critical tasks
• 20% of your time on supportive tasks
• less than 10% of your time on your combined: wish tasks, personal tasks and other tasks.

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