Simple personal time-management / sleep-tracking spreadsheet tool

Update 11/14/2011: I now use the very simple and elegant Android app for this.

I was looking around for some simple way to track my time on a 24-hour cycle, found a few articles related to tracking time spent browsing the internet, but nothing for my purposes so I made a simple spreadsheet with automatic tabulation of results.  It’s fairly self-explanatory and looks like this:

How to use:

1. Download here (right-click > Download to your computer)
2. Open in Excel
3. Setup your time category labels in column R
4. Print out a copy.  Write your weekly schedule (or as close approximation as you can) in columns B, D, E etc
5. As you go through the day jot down the numeric code of each activity you do per half-hour time slot on the printout, and then later transcribe to the computer.  You can choose to record EVERYTHING you do for a week including sleep (I did – it’s quite instructive) or, just write down significant events you want to track (ie, work activity)
6. I suggest you follow the procedure in Your Money or Your Lifeat the end of each week for valuing / prioritizing your time / money use.  For each time category, decide if
   • You want to spend more time on that activity
   • You want to spend less time
   • Or, it’s about right

Additional resources

• Found this: Xpert-timer works well for timing project-related activity at the computer.  Especially nice is the activity timer, with start/stop clock, and project assignment.  I am buying it for work-related activity and automatic invoice generation, but for personal use I still need something on paper that I can fill-in during the day and transcribe
• The ODesk application may work well for this purpose as well, and be free.  I need to check it out
• Lots of tools available for the very popular David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) methodology – see Zen Habits: 5 Simple, Effective GTD Tools and/or Google “GTD Tools”.

My issue with all of the above: they are great for work-related tasks, but I want a global solution that includes sleep and personal / recreational time, and that works when I am not at the computer.  I don’t want to run my life 24 hours as a project, but I do want to know where my time goes in order to perform a regular assessment / prioritization of my time usage.

I also need (separate project) a tool to track work-hours and automatically generate invoice details for billable hours.  Still looking, will follow-up on this later.

Tagged as: free sleep tracking software, free time tracking software, recording working hours, sleep tracking, time management tools, time tracking, time-management spreadsheet, xpert-timer