Time is Precious

I now do time tracking at work. For those uninitiated to corporate life, this might sound complicated and ominous. It is and it isn't. At its simplest, time tracking means recording how employees spend their time, which is only slightly different from punching a clock. As an exempt employee I am not technically paid by the hour, but am instead paid to do a job. What that means is if the "job" requires more time, then I must work longer. Yet, it doesn't always seem to work in the reverse. There always seems to be more "work" that can be added to a "job." Since this tends to be more my own doing than the company's, I really have no complaint.

However, just as observing a thing changes it, time tracking has changed how I perceive my time spent at work. And, while you might think that this change in perception may be exactly what the company had intended, instead it is the reverse.

A bit of personal history. For a good part of my life I have kept a journal, which often gets reduced to a simple record of who, what, when and a little bit of the how life happens. The journal has been a tool for me to identify and set goals and to record my progress towards these goals. Of course, some goals seem to be repeated in every single journal since I first scrawled them onto loose leaf paper back in the fifth grade. But for the most part, tracking my goals has worked quite well for me.

I have done a similar effort to record my time spent at work for similar reasons. I do know the value of time tracking. It seems to at least focus my energies towards a goal rather than allow my energy to be scattered with no goal in mind.

Back to my company. They recently introduced time tracking across all departments. Originally, the tool was part of a package that we would use to identify projects, set the priority of projects and the resources needed for each project. Based on who was available and when would then determine how quickly any given project could start and when it would likely be completed.

But as with many lofty goals, this evidently seemed too hard. Instead, the company skipped the first part and went directly to time tracking. The folly of tracking time without setting priorities first is that in reverse the results of tracking time spent without priorities is rather meaningless. What people spend time on today based on no clear priorities does not determine what they should spend time on in the future. Nor does it identify any resource gaps - meaning it doesn't tell management where or even when they simply don't have enough people to do the job. Frustrated people tend to average around 40 hours a week regardless of the need to work more or the chaos they leave at the end of each day. When the mountain of work never diminishes, people resort to simply punching a virtual clock.

So, quickly coming to my long awaited point. I have found that by officially tracking my time at work, my time overall has become more precious to me. I realized that I was giving away more of my time than I had thought. And, to what end was the question that followed that cinched it for me. Basically, my time has become a far greater commodity to me. My price went up and supply became more scarce. Simple economics.

Of course, I still do my job. I work very hard and I will give of my time when I really need to. But...that internal monitor that tells me when I need to kick in a little bit more has now been calibrated. It is tuned a little tighter than it was before.

And, just saying...I don't believe that this was the result that my company had expected or even had intended; but sometimes you don't get what you want. You get what you need.