Today is my last 2020 workday so I'm reflecting a bit on what I did this year, but also about my approach to time management this year and how I attempted to answer for myself that age-old principal engineer question "Why don't I have any time to do real work???" - a thread

Last year, breaking down how I spent my time into buckets of "types" of work helped a lot to visualize some areas where I needed to better balance, but this year I had a different balancing act working across a few different projects https://twitter.com/clare_liguori/status/1208152659053563904

I constantly felt like I wasn't getting to spend enough time on the right projects, but I couldn't figure out where all my time was going. I started doing very simple time journaling for 5 minutes at the end of each week, estimating how much time I spent by project and "other"

After a few weeks of writing down how I actually spent my time, I was able to see exactly how far off I was in reality from how I thought I was spending my time ("Estimated" below) and from my goals for how I wanted to allocate my time ("Planned" below)

All my time was going to Other! "Other" is any non-project things like design reviews for other teams, org planning & talent reviews, interviews, mentoring, etc. These are all important things! But the sum time I spent on this bucket had crept up over time without me realizing it

What I liked about visualizing my time management this way this year is it was easy to see where I needed to take action and re-prioritize. I only journaled my time for ~12 weeks and immediately started seeing some improvement & re-balancing to spend time where I was most needed