do a life audit

I’ve decided life is for living, not auditing.

I started my Life Audit yesterday, but I’m still unsure of what categories to choose. What worked for you?

i’ve got too many other things to keep up with right now.

already this is quite addictive.
It’s so satisfying!

i wonder what category this goes in for my log…

I’m working on completing one week of this starting tomorrow.

maybe after the week I’ll decide to do it for a month, but i’m committing for the week.

here goes!

It’s now becoming a habit to track my time on things. Occasionally I lose track for awhile and have to estimate, but I’m usually within fifteen minutes. I have gathered some valuable data. Time is even more precious than money. We should not want to waste a single minute of it. Time can be thrown away in a heartbeat. I am determined to not let that happen. I am more in control of my time now than I have ever been.

I’ve now been doing this again for 29 days. It’s helping me figure out how much time I am spending in important areas such as garden, piano, service and my business. I also have a program called top 20, which has expanded a bit. I keep track of more than 20 things. For high leverage areas such as garden, piano and my business I get one point for each 10 minutes on my top 20. For service I get one point for each 20 minutes. I would give service more credit, but it is easy to do service day in and day out and not take time for the other important things. So it has a little lower priority. But I still want to do some service.

I have now been keeping a life audit solidly for 21 days. The author of Life Audit says that you need about a month to get good data. Last week I printed out a pie chart of the previous week.

My breakdown of my time is was follows:
Business 19%
Rest 31%
Home 19%
Social 8%
Study 10%
Music 3%
Shopping 1%
Service 1%
Church 2%
Exercise 6%
Service 1%

I have data showing sub-categories of the above things but I have not made pie charts for it. I’ll have to see what all of this looks like by the end of the month.

I restarted my life audit as well as my activity log. I was able to categorize all of my activities in a tree structure, so that I can look at categories of activities to see how much time I am spending on them. One thing I’m keeping a careful watch on is how much time I’m putting into my new business.

I’ve done this now for 31 days which is a long enough period of time to get some valuable data. Unfortunately I will have to take a break because my computer needs servicing.