The Long Game

6

Strategic Leverage

We’ve all been there. You get to the end of an exhausting day and look back on the past eight or ten or twelve hours. You were certainly busy, racing from meeting to meeting and answering emails in every spare moment. But you wonder: What did I actually accomplish?

So often, our days begin to bleed together. We can keep up—barely—if everything goes right and there are no traffic delays or dropped calls or jammed printers. But keeping our heads above water certainly isn’t the same thing as accomplishing our long-term goals.

I wanted to get strategic about my life. But first, I needed data—where was my time actually going, anyway? Time tracking isn’t fun. It’s boring and meticulous, and marking down your life in fifteen-minute ...