Time Management — Bullet Journaling: Weekly Chronodex
Two years ago my then 12 year old daughters turned me on to bullet journaling. I didn’t adopt it in the crafty, picturesque way that they did it but more inline with the original time management, professional approach. This series of posts will show how I use my bullet journal for time management and a strong sense of mindfulness through my day. I will be loaded with pictures and detailed explanations. I’ll include what has been tried and true for me and at least one experimental thing about which the jury is still out.
I was familiar with bullet journaling from my daughters. After numerous sticker, journal, stencil, and pen purchases, as well as special orders from Japan for everything from stamps to paper, I knew what it was all about to them. One of them even had on the top of their Hanukkah wish list a leather Traveler’s Notebook. I encouraged them and in turn they knew I was note taker and lover of paper so they encouraged me to join them in the activity. They thought my method of use was boring and no fun. For me it was neither. For me it brought mindfulness to each work week and each hour of each work day. It brought relaxation. It brought a value add to my work. It also encouraged others at work to try their hand at the same as well as to respect my budgeted time more. There were no downsides for me. Let me share with you in a series of posts. Take from it what is useful. For this post I’ll share the most fundamental part of a weekly “spread” in my bullet journal.
The plan for me was to provide better planning and traceability in my efforts and to see where my time went versus where I expected it to go. What I hadn’t planned for was the mindfulness and a sense of comfort that I also gathered from the daily and weekly ceremonies I began as part of maintaining a productivity bullet journal. Image 1 shows part of a single page from a two page weekly set. More focused images will follow along with detailed explanations. A notable item is how much my bullet journal differed from the style of my daughters’ bullet journal (Image 2). It is no wonder they thought mine ugly and boring.
Where does my time go each week? The Chronodex has the answer.
I plan for each coming week by sitting down and creating my weekly “spread”. A spread is bullet journaling (bujo) lingo for a set of pages on a topic. One of the three pages I create each week is my chronodex page. It contains the following:
- Planned Work Table: a table of 6–8 broad categories of work. I make the list consistent between each week. This table contains the planned/budgeted effort for each category of work.
- Daily Actual Work Table: a table with a row for each day of the work week and each hour of the work day to capture which of the categories of work from the Planned Work Table were performed in that time slot.
- Chronodex: a chart of the planned versus the actual work for the week.
Planned Work Table
Every week before the work week starts I lay out the page with all the empty charts and tables. I then think about the upcoming week, look back at past weeks, estimate where I think I will spend my time for the entire week and create hour estimates for each of the categories of work in the Planned Work Table. In Image 3 you can see I divide my week into 7 categories with the all important “Other” category. Each category of work will get from 0 to 38 hours. Why 38? My employer had a 38 hour work week. Everything I do will fall into one of these buckets. The categories are broad for this reason. I found if I create too many narrow categories then choosing between them becomes a chore and too few provides poor feedback. The sweet spot for me is 6–8 categories. These are categories I use every single week so that I can compare one week to another. Each category gets a color. “Where are the meetings?” you ask. Every meeting hour get placed like all other work into one of these categories. Thus why the “Other” category is so important and gets almost 20% of my time allotment. In the end I have created a budget for how I expect to spend my time for the next work week.
Chronodex
Next up I create the Chronodex (Image 4) which has three concentric circles divided into 40 slices. The inner most circle I just note the work week. The middle circle will have each slice representing an hour color coded as per the budgeted hours from the Planned Work Table. In the sample there were 5 hours budgeted for Operations thus the brown that denotes Operations is colored into 5 slices of the middle circle. The chronodex at this stage is just just showing the planned/budgeted hours for the week. As the week goes on we’ll use the outer circle to color code how time was actually spent.
Daily Actual Work Table
The Daily Actual Work table will get filled in each hour of each day as it occurs. It consists of a block for each hour of the work day that I color with one of the colors from the Planned Work Table based on what I did in that hour. I will subdivide a time block into 2 parts if needed thus am tracking at a half hour granularity. If I go off to a 1 hour meeting I may divide that 1 hour meeting into 30 minutes for Release Planning and 30 minutes into Process, Design, and Docs. If 30 minutes isn’t granular enough then I assign the 30 minutes to either Other or whatever category took the majority or plurality of the time.
Image 5 shows the Daily Actual Work Table with the first day of the work week completed. In my sample it runs from 7 am to 7 pm. Hour blocks with no color means that there was no work effort in that time.
After the work day is completed the actual hours are translated onto the Chronodex into the outer circle (Image 6). One of the valuable benefits of the Chronodex visualization is that if you fill up all the slices for a given category of work you have to think about which category you will take hours from to meet an additional demand. For instance Image 7 shows the actual work after day 3 of the work week completed. Image 8 shows the corresponding Chronodex. Note how in Image 8 all the planned/budgeted hours for Release Planning (purple) were filled but thus far an actual half hour more has been performed. I chose to take from the Tech Debt (yellow) budget to meet the Release Planning overflow.
Image 9 shows the page after the end of the week. Operations (brown), Release Planning (purple), and Automation (green) all ran over budget and took most the hours allotted for Process, Design, Docs (orange) and all the hours for Tech Debt (yellow). Additionally, I worked one half hour over the 38 planned hours as shown by the extra green Automation shading over the blank budgeted slice.
Mindfulness
So where does the mindfulness come into play? It’s really simple. It’s also amazingly powerful for many folks.
- Every week before the week starts I think about how I expect the work for the week to play out and budget accordingly. Looking back at weeks that I think might be similar and using their actuals to guide my new budget.
- Every 30 minutes to an hour I stop for 30 seconds and record what I have done for the last hour in a broad very simple way. It is amazing how soothing taking even less than a minute to “color” can be for many people.
- Every morning I update my Chronodex based on the prior day’s Daily Actual Work Table. It lets me reflect on how yesterday compared to what I had hoped and how I need to adjust today.
- At then end of the week between the work weeks I start over. Looking both at the prior week to see how I did and cycling back around to plan for a new week.
Part two “Visualizing your Risk Momentum” has been published. Part two does not rely on this post’s content.
