Try It! Survey - Do You Really Know How You Spend Your Time?

We all do so many things in a day, that generally, we do them without thinking about how much time we spend. And that’s ok, unless you regularly feel that there are not enough hours in the day to finish all the things you set out to do. It’s ok, unless you typically forget to keep appointments, or can’t find the time to complete assignments for the next day or the next week. So how can you get control of your life? The following exercise has three parts: an assessment phase, a diary phase, and a reality phase. The intent here is to determine how much time you actually spend on daily activities in order to prioritize and redirect the amount of time you might spend on one activity to another, more crucial one. Do you really know how much time you spend watching soap operas? Or eating pizza? Or talking on the phone? Now’s your chance to find out.

I. Assessment Phase

Next to the item in the list, estimate how many minutes/hours you think you spend on it in the course of a day. If a category doesn’t apply to you, just skip it. Use a quick judgment based on your memory—don’t spend a lot of time thinking about it!