Time Tracking - A Bridge between Mindfulness and Productivity

One bridge between productivity and mindfulness practice is the idea that simply paying attention to something can help improve it. When you are asked to pay attention to your posture, you naturally sit up straighter. When you bring your attention to your breath, you breathe deeper.

The effect of observation leading to improvement was named the Hawthorne Effect by Henry Landsberger when studying the Hawthorne Works factory - who had commissioned a study to see under which conditions worked best. It turned out that no matter what the factory did, the workers worked better just after changes were made, including when they returned the factory to its original conditions. The researchers concluded that the improvement was simply due to the workers knowledge that they were being observed. (A 2009 reassessment of the original data suggests that the original effect was overstated, but the name of the effect remains the same)

So why do you care? It's possible to utilize this observation for your own benefit. One thing to try is time tracking. Take a little piece of paper, or write in your Moleskine, or a little text file in your computer, what you're doing when you're working. The way I do this is to note the time of day and what project I'm working on. So when I goof off on twitter, I write "1:23 Twitter," and when I return to work on A Space Within, I write "1:24 ASW." I tried keeping track of this on a tiny time tracking program on my Mac for a little while and though it had the advantages of a) just clicking to change what I'm working on and b) tallying the amounts of each project and each category for me, I find that writing down what I'm doing with a pen feels more like me watching me.

Now, it's really important not to simply allow this to become more fuel for your inner critic (the part of you that says "You're wrong! You should be doing such-and-such! How could you have possibly made that choice!") The idea of the exercise is simply to bring attention. If you can muster it, gentle attention . Through attention you can gain lots of insight about yourself (I always seem to work for 45 min and then get distracted) and your working patterns (I am way less stressed when I work on my big project first and then check my email.)

Through this time tracking exercise (just a normal tool someone might ask you to do at work but with a different twist), we can gain a sense of paying attention all the time, distancing yourself from the drama of the work, the drama of ourselves at the ground level. You can get a sense of watching yourself over your shoulder. You can begin to identify more with the you that's watching you.