Planning for Success at Work

There's a book I think you should read, What the Most Successful People Do at Work: A Short Guide to Making Over Your Career by Laura Vanderkam. It's the third in this series by her, and I recommend the other two as well: What the Most Successful People Do Before Breakfast: A Short Guide to Making Over Your Mornings--and Life and What the Most Successful People Do on the Weekend: A Short Guide to Making the Most of Your Days Off.

It's the third one, though, that came out recently, and that she's blogging about right now (yes, I also recommend her blog). And, most salient to me at the moment, she talked about and quoted me, as we've been emailing back and forth about a time makeover she was doing for me. You can go read about the importance of planning, here.

I'm not reviewing these books right now, that isn't the goal of this particular post; but I have to say, one of the things I love about them (and, again, her blog) is that they're very much based on real data. Here's what people actually do. Here's what actually seems to work. Here's how what people think they spend their time doing differs from what they actually do, as they discover when they keep time logs.

I'm logging my time again, third time I've done it now. I've decided I'd like to share this one publicly, but I'm not exactly live blogging it (it's not up yet, that link is to an example of a public time log, on Laura Vanderkam's site) -- I'd like to wait until I've added up totals before I write about each day, and that takes a little bit more time. [6/3/13 Edit: First day is up now, here.] (Though I recently discovered toggl, thanks to some blog comments, so I'm hoping it'll be faster now... just need to input the data, since I found the app after the fact.) But soon, I hope, I'll post the first day up here, my Wednesday of last week.

I don't want to bore you with details of my life just to hear myself talk, despite my blog's header. I'm hoping there are some things in my logs that could start some interesting conversations related to your lives, as much or as little as you'd like to share. I'm hoping that at the least sharing my logs can inspire you to track your time for a bit, too.

What do you think, want to join me in her challenges?