Why guessing your schedule sabotages your success

You shove back from your desk, startled by the clock’s harsh red digits and the ping of a new message. You’ve raced through the morning but can’t recall what you actually did. Your coffee has gone cold and the nagging doubt lingers: did you waste all this time?

Last week, you swore you’d tackle that big report, but it never got off your to-do list. Instead, a string of ad hoc tasks—a one-off training request, an email chain, an endless group chat—sucked the minutes away. You thought you were focused, but your memory lied. Studies show humans misjudge time spent on multitasking by up to 30 percent, leaving us blind to our own inefficiencies.

I might be wrong, but when you start logging each task the moment it happens, everything changes. The act of recording forces you to pause and notice. You sense the click of your pen, the tap of keys, even the hum of the printer, anchoring your awareness. Each entry becomes a breadcrumb trail, guiding you back to what truly deserves your effort.

Once you’ve logged a few days, the patterns stand out: meetings ballooning, unplanned calls creeping in, small tasks overtaking deep focus. Armed with real data, you reclaim your time—consolidating trivial work, pruning low-value meetings, and protecting uninterrupted blocks. This simple habit draws on time-management science, treating time as the scarce, perishable resource it is. By tracking first and improving later, you build a system for lasting focus and performance.

Every morning, grab your notepad or open your tracking app and mark down every switch in your work—no matter how small. At week’s end, group entries by activity—say Admin, Meeting, Deep Work—and tally your totals so you can see where you really spent time. Finally, compare this data to what you thought you did, and note the surprises. Armed with these insights, you’ll know exactly which habits to prune so you can carve out space for the work that matters. Give it a try today.