Life doesn't follow paper
Planning your day tells you what should happen. Tracking it tells you what actually did.
A timetable means deciding in advance what you'll do at every moment of the day. You split the day into blocks — say, 15 minutes each — and assign an activity to each one: eating, working, studying, exercising, leisure.
It's great in theory. My problem with it is that life doesn't follow paper. Some things take longer than planned, and some days bring emergencies nobody announced.
So recently, I've been experimenting with the opposite: a time tracker. Instead of planning the day in detail beforehand, I keep a rough idea of my routine and log everything after I've done it. If my morning routine takes an hour today, I log it from 8:00 to 9:00 am.
There's one rule I try to follow: before I start anything, I ask myself, "How long am I going to spend on this?" If I want to relax and watch a series, I decide first how much time I'm giving it.
In the end, I get the same picture of my day that a timetable would give me — but with far more flexibility. And I can see exactly how much I worked and how much I procrastinated.
Right now, my main goal is to control two variables: work and leisure. But you could use it to track anything in your life.
Do you plan your time, track it, or neither?