 One of the practices I do several times a year, especially at the beginning of the year and towards the end of the year when I'm kind of evaluating how things have gone, is a practice called time logging. Now time logging is simply writing down where my time goes on a daily basis. And I try to do this for about a two-week period as frequently as I can, meaning in that two-week period, I try to log everything from waking to sleeping. Now how detailed do I go? Well, it really depends on your needs, but I try, once you start doing time logging, you'll start to figure out how detail you want to track. So for example, I have an activity on my time log called morning review. Morning review basically is where I start to look at my priorities for the day. I look at maybe some of the emails that are urgent and important. I might answer a few of them. I will do my energy reboot to get my spirit attitude in a good place to start the day, things like that. But I don't track each one of those little things at a separate like, oh, I did one minute of energy reboot. I did, you know, five minutes of email. I did, you know, six minutes of prioritization. That is a little bit too detailed for me. So my morning review is, you know, a half hour. But the key to time logging is not how detailed you go. The key to time logging is developing the awareness of where your time is going. So even if you are, you know, not very good at the detail and just say, well, basically for the last three hours, I did this and you write it down. Okay? That itself is helpful. So I really recommend you try doing this at least for a week, just to kind of, again, it's not the perfection of the log. It's not, oh, did I really spend, you know, three to six p.m. exactly doing this? No. It's the fact that you are writing down and giving at least an approximate of what you did helps you to be more conscious going forward of how you are investing this precious resource called our time and our energy. So remember, perfectionism is not the goal. Awareness is the goal. Now, one other thing I do that I find really helpful and also real quick in terms of how do you log your time? You can simply have a notepad of posted notes that you keep in your pocket and with a little, you know, pencil or pen at all times. And just every time you find yourself switching activities, you take it out and you write, okay, this is what I'm doing now, time starting at what time, you know, 1.35 p.m. start, you know, recording video or whatever it may be, recording and writing my video. And then when I stop doing it, I'll say, all right, it's 1.55 p.m. And then now I'm going to start doing blah, blah, blah instead. Okay. Now, sometimes, again, you're going to have maybe hours go by where you forgot to do time locking. Don't beat yourself up. Remember, perfection is not the goal. Awareness is the fact that you became aware that you forgot to log your time is itself a good thing because then you become conscious again, kind of like in meditation, when they teach you to be conscious of yourself and of your breath, rather, be conscious of your breath and then your mind drifts off and then you become conscious that, oh, my gosh, my mind's been drifting for the last three minutes. You don't beat yourself up. You go, oh, I congratulate myself that I just became aware of that and therefore I bring my mind back to the breath again. Same thing with time logging. Oh, did I have I not been tracking it? Just track it. And honesty is also really important. Okay. Honesty is important. Even if you're doing something you don't want to be doing, write it down. Write down that, you know, yes, I spent the last two hours, you know, playing a video game or spend the last two hours surfing Facebook or spend the last two, you know, whatever it may be, write it down so that you're aware. Oh, okay. So next time I'll be more conscious when I start doing that activity that I maybe don't want to do less. Okay. So one more thing that's been helpful for me for time logging is evaluating the benefit, enjoyment and learning. So there are three factors I use to score each activity. Okay. BEL is the short benefit, enjoyment and learning. Did it benefit somebody else? Okay. Did it benefit somebody else? That's really what I do. If it did benefit, then I put a B next to it. Did it benefit someone else? E is did I enjoy the activity? Did I enjoy the activity? Did I feel like I was in flow or did I just have fun doing that activity? Was it meaningful for me? Did it feel good for me to do that activity? Even if it's sometimes not feeling good, sometimes there's some discomfort, but there's an enjoyment on a deeper level. Then put an E. Okay. Or maybe surface enjoyment. That's fine too. Put an E. Yes, I did. And an L is did I learn something useful for my purpose? So if my purpose is to serve my clients with excellence and with empathy, did I learn something about that? If I just did a client call, if I did learn something, put an L. Or if my purpose right now is to do content that is engaging for you and that's useful for you, then I learned something in doing this. If I did, and I feel like I did, I put an L. So BEL, benefit, enjoyment and learning. So after every time I actually, you know, what I have done is when I start doing an activity, I kind of make a guess. Is it going to benefit someone else? Am I going to enjoy it? And am I going to learn something? And I'll kind of put that in first. And then at the end of the activity, when I go back to my log and log it, if I didn't really enjoy it, I'll cross out the E, for example. And so this is really helpful because not that you're going to do a careful analysis. You might, you might actually at the end of the week, if you, if you want to really make great use of this, you'll look back at your time log and go, all right, which activities that I most enjoy, which activities that I most benefit at someone else, which activities that I most learn something useful for my purpose. And then you'll just even looking at your log will give you the consciousness of doing those kinds of things more in the future. But even if you didn't analyze it, but just simply wrote that down, you will become more aware. Like I, like I told you, I read it down even before I start doing the activity, I will actually make it a self fulfilling prophecy and end up enjoying the activity more. I'll kind of, you know, I'll say, you know, yes, I'm going to learn something in this activity. I'll probably learn something and then I will find myself learning something. So if you do this BEL thing in the beginning of your time log for that activity, and then at the end, you can say, you can cross out the thing that wasn't true. That itself will help you to do more activities going forward that benefit other people. That allow you to enjoy yourself and then that helps you learn something useful for, for your purpose. So I hope that this is helpful. This has been revolutionary in my life to be doing, doing this time logging activity. Again, even if you do it one week a year, it's going to be helpful. I try to do it in a two week time period, several two to three times a year. And that just kind of recalibrates my productivity a lot. So I hope this is helpful. And until the next video, my name is George Cowell and I'm wishing you greater time awareness.