Using time tracking to keep yourself accountable while working from home

Keeping yourself accountable

Using TimeTag to stay on track with your goals

When you're working from home, it's easy to be distracted -- there are so many things that are within reach that can pull you away for minutes, hours, maybe even days. It's easy to think: I'll put on a Netflix show real quick, and watch only one episode. Then that episode ends in a cliffhanger, and you think: well, the next one is autoplaying, so okay I'll watch one more but that's it. Then it keeps going. Before you know it, that one episode of 29 minutes has turned into a 3 or 4 hour binge fest, and you're thinking: wow, where did my day go? Did I actually get anything I wanted done?

I use TimeTag to help protect against things like this -- by building a system of accountability. The way we spend our time is the way we that we achieve our goals. If I know that I want to spend 20-30 minutes every day writing, then I can use TimeTag as a way to keep myself on track for that. I set a goal in the app, and do my best to log the time. It's about showing up every day. There's really no other magic secret. I can't wake up one morning and suddenly have a blog full of content, and have hundreds of thousands of visitors. Google won't suddenly discover the site and start putting it at the top of relevant search results. No -- none of those things are going to happen with a finger snap.

Instead, it's a game of time, patience, and showing up. It's about the 20-30 minutes every day -- an article like this that is hopefully helpful to someone -- which is then hopefully shared with someone else who might find it helpful. And so on. The more I write, the more likely it is that I write something that strikes a chord with someone. The more likely that Google does start to feature my search result higher. The more likely that my business grows, and my visitors reaches into those hundreds of thousands or ideally millions count.

I use TimeTag as a way to track my time -- not to be paid for it -- but to be accountable to it. If I look back at my day, or my week, and see that I only spent 5 minutes writing when I had intended to spend 300? And instead I know that I spent that time watching mindless television? That's on me.

I don't want to shame anyone on binge watching tv -- I seriously do it all the time. I will go through periods where that's exactly what I am craving, and I allow myself the space to do it. But then I go back to "my why". Why do I want to build a successful blog? Why do I want to build a successful business? What will it take to get there?

And I get back to work.