Time to Review Eternity
In a previous post I talked about the late great Randy Pausch and his lecture on time management. (You can check it out here). One of the points he makes is that it’s important to track your time.
Ever since Jason aka Jay talked about this in the Internet Business Mastery Academy, I’ve been struggling with finding a way to track actual time spent against my planned/projected calendar and schedule. At the time of watching Randy’s video, I was experimenting with using a combination of my Google Calendars with Freshbooks time tracking, plus Chronolite. Honestly, it wasn’t really working for me.
Something clicked, however, after watching the time management video, and I jumped into action.
Now, a quick tangent, because I want to share with you something I’ve never shared before. It’s my obscenely geeky way of testing out ideas and apps to find the best tool for the job. Here it goes: When I have a new topic, hobby, or area of interest I want to explore, I download lots of free iPhone apps that I feel are relevant. And by lots I mean between 15 and 30.
After I’ve filled up a new page or two on my iPhone with new applications, I do a quick scan to eliminate any that seem poorly designed, underfunded (read: company won’t be around in 3 months), or simply irrelevant. I’m usually left with half a dozen iPhone apps that are free or “lite” and I try them out for a period of time.
As usual, I downloaded every single free iPhone application that I thought might have something to do with time tracking or logs or billing to try and find the solution I was looking for.
That is exactly how I came across Eternity. I missed it the first time, but I think the way Pausch phrased it caused me to use different search keywords in the iPhone apps store when looking for time management solutions. (Which is why carefully and liberally choosing your keywords is so incredibly important!)
Eternity is one of the very, very few applications that I’ve paid money for. I upgraded to the premium version to give myself more entries that I can track, and the ability to export to an excel file (which I have yet to use, to be honest.) It’s incredibly helpful when someone asks me what I did over the weekend, or if I need to remember if the dog is just whining today for fun, or if I’ve forgotten to feed and walk him.
TAKE ACTION:
- Do you have a great way of measuring how you budget your time, versus how you actually spend it? Please share!
- Learn more about the Eternity iPhone app at Komorian.com