I tracked every minute of my life for a year.

For an entire year, I tracked every minute of my day. How many hours spent working socializing reading even scrolling on social media. The reason I did this was because I constantly felt like I didn't have enough time despite following pretty typical time management advice.

And I had heard a lot about time tracking before from entrepreneurs like Sam Corkos and Rob Derk who have credited this habit to their success.

But over a few months, I actually noticed some patterns and made some pretty big changes that helped me achieve a lot of my goals last year.

If you've never tracked your time before, I would highly recommend that you try it out, even for a week, because it'll probably be pretty interesting to see an actual breakdown of how you spend your time.

But to save you a year of doing this, I thought I would make a video sharing the things that I learned.

Some of the tools that I use to actually help me save time and also share with you how I approached my calendar at the end of the video.

The first thing I learned was how you think you spend your time is usually not how you actually spend your time.

When I was working in a corporate consulting job a few years ago, I had two main projects I was working on.

I was trying to build a crowdfunding platform and also trying to build a podcast at the same time. The idea with them was that one of them could take off and I could quit at some point.

But even after a year of grinding those two projects out, they never really took off.

At the time, if you ask me, I definitely thought that I was spending a lot of hours thinking about this and actually working on them. But it wasn't until I actually started tracking my time that I realized I was actually only spending 20% of my productive hours actually working on these projects.

Most of my brain power is obviously being sucked away from my corporate job, but I also saw in a breakdown that I was also spending a lot of time cooking, cleaning, preparing food, and even commuting and even stuff that felt like it was productive, like talking about the project or doing research.

There was a lot of time that wasn't really used in the best way. And there were also a lot of tiny distractions, like I realized that checking my phone, even for 15 minutes at a time, several times throughout the day, could add up to multiple hours.

And once you start tracking your time, you realize how many of these little distractions you have because, you know, every time you switch tasks, you have to start a timer, you have to stop the timer, and it made me hyper aware of really how distracted I was throughout the day. So, it wasn't really because I didn't have enough time to work on my projects, but it was because I would waste a lot of those hours.

And the most effective solution that I found for this was not actually scheduling things out on a calendar and following that, but it was just removing all distractions.

Once you remove distractions, then there will be nothing left that is stimulating to do.

And so you'll naturally gravitate towards the thing that you want to work on.

So that's when I started doing things like turning my smartphone into a dumb phone or installing social media blocks on my computer.

And instead of working on multiple projects at a time, I decided to just work on one of them because I realized that certain projects can also become distractions over time.

I talked about this in my previous video about lessons I learned from eight years of journaling, but from my personal experience, I get way better results when I pursue one thing at a time.

Eventually, that also led to me quitting my job because it was sort of like a distraction with a paycheck.

The second thing I learned is that you should prioritize energy management over time management.

And there's two reasons for this.

The first is that you have different levels of focus throughout the day.

There's a good article about this by Harvard Business Review that you can check out.

But essentially, if you track your energy levels and your time throughout the day, you'll notice that there are natural peak and troughs throughout the day, which align with your circadian rhythm and your actual ability to stay focused and pay attention throughout the day is based on things like how well you slept, what you ate, your genetics, and even what's going on in your personal life.

So, initially when I quit my job to pursue entrepreneurship, in some ways it was actually harder because now my calendar was completely empty and I had to plan what to do at what times during the day.

At first, I followed pretty typical time management advice, which is just trying to schedule out my entire week and plotting when I would go work out, when I would do deep work. But when I actually tried that out, it wasn't really the most efficient way, at least for me.

Aside from the fact that it literally just makes you into NPC.

When you prioritize time management over energy management, then you assume that every unit of hour produces the same amount of attention and output.

Once I actually had the habit of tracking my time, I could pretty clearly see that even though time was linearly decreasing throughout the day, my actual energy and attention would be more like a sine wave.

And it would also highly depend on the task I was doing. So the way that I started to see my day was that there were different blocks that were the best for different tasks. For example, it's a lot easier for me to do cognitively intensive tasks like coding or writing in the morning or doing creative stuff at night like editing or making YouTube thumbnails.

But the second reason why you should prioritize energy management over time management is because your ability to focus in the next hour is highly affected by the task that you just did an hour ago. One of the biggest things you realize when you track your time is not every hour is equal.

Even if two things take the same one unit of time, like 1 hour, the actual cost of it is not the same. One task might completely drain you and another task might completely energize you.

The CEO of Levels, Sam Corkos, he's tracked his time for over a decade. And he wrote an article about everything that he learned after doing that. One of the things he said in that article was burnout is more tightly correlated to working on things that suck your energy than the number of hours worked.

You can work 10 hours a week and still feel like you're burning out if what you're doing for those 10 hours is quite draining. So, it's really important to figure out the tasks that are the most draining and either try to push them off towards later in the day or try to not do them entirely.

For me, one of the biggest things I realized that was draining and sucking energy for me was email. And the reason for that was because a large part of it was really just going through and figuring out what was valuable and what was not valuable.

But for the past few months, I've been using this app called Superhum.

And it's been an actual game changer.

Because of that, I actually got in contact with them and they agreed to sponsor this video. Let me just show you my favorite features of Superhum.

So this is what Superhum looks like and I can navigate everything using the keyboard.

So, if I just complete my email and I'm at inbox zero, this is what it looks like. It just shows a different picture every every day.

And you can separate your inbox into multiple different categories.

This is what it looks like when an email comes in.

I can reply to it super easily by hitting enter.

And if I use command J, I can use AI to write a draft if I want to, or I can just type it myself, like, hey, hey there, and hit enter to send out the email. One small feature that I really like with Superhuman is that there read receipts with all the emails that you sent. So you can see right here it says email has not yet been opened.

Once it's read, you can see it says open by Eric just now at what time and even on what device. So if you use this then you know if somebody actually read your email or if they're just ghosting you.

If you hit command K, then you can see the different features and commands in Superhum.

Another thing that saves me a lot of time in Superhuman are called snippets.

So if you hit command semicolon, these are snippets that you can preset to respond to different emails.

So for example, if I want someone to book time on my calendar, I can just hit this one and it will input this snippet.

So you can customize this however you want based on emails that you might get. They recently just added a native calendar which connects your email that you can just look at by hitting this tab on the left right here.

But this also makes it really useful if you want to set up a meeting with anybody.

So, for example, right here, if I want to schedule a meeting, I hit command shift A. I can book out some times on my calendar that will become a link that they can just schedule.

So, this really makes things a lot faster and more seamless because no matter what time zone the other person is in, they can just click on this link and schedule a time pretty easily. Earlier, I showed how you can use AI to help you write drafts, but you can also use AI to ask questions about other people.

So, once you ask that a question, it'll go through your email, search for the answer, and then give it to you.

So, who did I schedule a meeting with last month?

I just asked, "Who did I schedule a meeting with last month?" It'll check my calendar for people I schedule a meeting with, and then it send me a breakdown of everyone I called with.

You can also use their AI to automatically help you categorize your emails and split them into different labels or inboxes to help you organize and go through your email faster.

Superhum can really be as simple or complex as you want it to be based on how many emails you get.

Once I actually started using Superhum, I realized that there's currently no other email client that works in the same way. The app actually works really well on all mobile devices and most of the time I'm actually just using it on my iPad because all the keyboard shortcuts work exactly the same.

So, if you also waste a lot of time on email and you want to try this out, you can use this link which will give you 1 month completely free to try it out.

But yeah, let's get back into the video.

But besides Superhum, which is super effective for reducing time you spend on email, I also want to share a few tips that help me save up to 20 hours a week. The first is to reduce complexity in your life. What this looks like would be different for everyone, but one general rule I found is that owning less things help reduce complexity.

And I don't mean become a minimalist where you don't own anything because a lot of times actually introduces more complexity.

But through time tracking I realized that there were a lot of things I own that I would need to spend time just managing. And a lot of times these were things that I thought would actually save me time.

Like for example, I bought a robot vacuum cleaner that would clean my apartment automatically.

But because I had to connect it to an app, I had to update it regularly. I had to swap out the parts and also most of the time it would get stuck in random places.

It was actually costing me a lot of time just to keep this robot vacuum active.

So for me, this is just one new vector I look at when it comes to purchases.

Does it actually introduce more complexity or reduce complexity?

Another thing I would recommend doing is batching.

For me, because I cook a lot of my meals at home, I saw that I was spending a lot of time just cooking, cleaning, even deciding what to eat every single day.

So instead, what I started to do on some weeks is that I would cook all my meals for the entire week in a single afternoon.

And that would really save me 10 or 15 hours pretty easily in a single week.

And I didn't have spent any time during the week thinking about what I was going to eat or preparing it.

After a year of tracking my time, I've made some pretty big changes to how I actually approach scheduling things out on my calendar now. And so now I want to share with you how I actually approach using a calendar. One thing that became super obvious to me was that work expands to the amount of time that you allocate.

So if I scheduled two hours coding or two hours writing, I was actually tracking the wrong metric.

So instead, I like to have tasks that I need to finish in a day. And that way I can actually be motivated to be more productive and finish them quickly or spend more time on them if I'm feeling inspired.

And on my calendar, I only try to put things that involve other people.

Stuff like meetings, hangouts, or flights.

I don't like to schedule things out like working out, deep work, reading, hobbies.

Whenever I try doing that, it really just burns me out.

It makes me feel like I'm a MPC that I have to follow this really strict schedule.

So, if you have a set time that you have to go to work or go to school, I would definitely schedule that. And then I would really pay attention to my energy to see when are the best times to do the tasks that I need to do for that day.

And that way, if I'm feeling more productive, I can get them done earlier and focus on other things. Or I can work all day about one thing that I care about.

Naval Ravakan who is this really famous investor once said a busy calendar and a busy mind will destroy your ability to do great things in this world.

So what I learned is that the most impactful thing that you can do is to treat your time and attention as the most valuable depleting resource.

There's a book I would recommend called indistractable which talks about this.

I also made a video about that book that you can check out right here.

But see over there let's get it.