Time tracking blog

Attention shoppers – there are only 10 days left until Christmas.  In isle 7, save a bundle on this season’s hottest holiday gift: time.

Say what now?

A show of hands (or comments if you like) – who’s got their holiday shopping done?  I’ve often found that there are two very distinct groups: One that has their holiday shopping done by August (Yes, I’m talking to you mom) and those that wait until just about the last possible moment, and spend Christmas morning getting up just a bit earlier to umm…make the coffee (more along the lines of – oh crap!  Did I forget to wrap Susan’s present)?  I fall into category two.  So this year, I’m trying something a bit different: Using TSheets to optimize my holiday experience.

Around the 20th of November I logged into my TSheets account and started making job codes of people that I had to buy gifts for.  In my case, this amounted to around 15 people.  I then set up a bunch of job codes: Shopping with three subcodes: specialty item shopping, online shopping, and brick and mortar shopping.  Next, onto travel time and finishing up with wrapping time.

The rest is self-explanatory.  I’ve been using the TSheets iPhone mobile time tracking app to track the times that I spend walking to, waiting for, riding, and walking to the shops I need to go (note to self: a mall would help simplify this process).  Then with a simple flip of the job codes, I’ve been tracking the actual time spent looking through the stores to find that perfect cashmere for her, and that book I told him about months ago.  Likewise, back at casa del Dan, I’ve been using the TSheets desktop widget to track time that I’m spending on amazon.com to find, compare, and order various gifts for aforementioned 15 folks.  And now for the real challenge: wrapping.  When it comes to packaging gifts into a nice to look at format held together with scotch tape, I seem to have been born with three thumbs.  As of today, I’ve only wrapped seven out of the thirty or so gifts that I’ve either already got in the house, or on their way (thanks UPS!).

The Breakdown:

While I’m not yet completely done, thus far I’ve managed to rack up:

• Travel – 4 hours 58 minutes
• Shopping - 17 hours 18 minutes
• Wrapping – 1 hour 18 minutes

17 Hours shopping?  Yes, I know…I’m surprised too.  Either I need to seriously rethink my gift selection and purchasing process or hire a personal shopper.  The travel doesn’t really shock me, as noted, I did not go to a ‘get it all under one roof’ shopping complex, but have traveled to a number of individual stores.  Wrapping?  Well, no shock there to be honest.

What does it all mean?

To be honest, this is the first year/holiday season that I’ve experimented with time tracking in relation to personal shopping, and the results have been truly eye opening.  As noted above, 17.2 hours of shopping is really ridiculous.  Next year I’ll be rethinking the process and perhaps spend either a bit more time thinking gifts out before I even head out the door, or spending a lot more time with amazon.

Think you’re a Holiday Power Shopper?  Prove it.  TSheets time tracker is not just for business, but personal productivity.  Holiday shopping is something that we all do, whether we want to or not, so why not make it as efficient and productive as possible?

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