Harvard University Global System^™

Harvard^® Professional Mission & Quality-of-Life Time Log
Gathering, Diagnosis & Intervention on What Matters Most

Lasting control over your time is a wishful thinking unless it is based on facts. This practical instrument comes with a complete set of questions to assist you auditing your work practices, quickly discover and analyze where your time really goes, take corrective action, review progress and focus on real priorities, without ignoring unavoidable obligations.

Tracking time through continuous logging of everything you do is a time-consuming and inefficient task, be it for a whole week or any contiguous period of time. No week is representative of your workload which can peak on which can peak on a specific week, month, season or even a calendar day (e.g. month ends, Mondays). It is also is prone to the law of diminishing-return errors, As an illustration, after a while, those who alternate between tasks, or are in a frequent multi-tasking mode, tend to neglect or forget to track their work in real time.

With the Harvard^® Professional Mission & Quality-of-Life Time Log, logging time requires neither a change in your work habits nor in your day-to-day behavior. You simply select a new day of the week every five weeks and log your work, fitness, rest, errands, interruptions, personal endeavors and everything you do on that day only. If you have filled a couple of templates, end the the data gathering; but resume the process at the same time five weeks later to cover the missing part of the day. The frequency of logging every five weeks can be adjusted to 3 weeks in areas or periods of high diversity and uncertainty. Avoid a monthly frequency to prevent tracking the same period of the month and miss the rest.

At the end of the time-logging day, take a moment to address three kind personal and professional quality-of-life questions: (a) Effectiveness questions related to your personal, family and organizational mission, (b) Productivity/efficiency questions related to how you live, work and (c) Impact questions related to outcome/results; all from a 360 degrees perspective. The Log provides blank columns for other important professional and quality-of-life questions you care about.

These questions and the analytic approach in the back-page provide the framework to analyze, take corrective action and track life-managment progress as you go, to ensure a greater focus on priorities and a sustainable mission-driven performance improvement. Thus, you can identify life/time-wasters and other roots of stress and inadequate performance (changing external environment, skills-deficits, role conflicts, delegation, sub-performing tools, outdated systems), distraction, procratination, sleep deprivation, attention fragmentation and the pattern of frequent interactions with specific people or repetitive-work clusters. Armed with facts, you can raise sensitive time-wasting and quality-of-life questions with your partner, coworkers and leaders. Some of your family members and teammates may not even realize the damage they inflict on you by their time-wasting behavior.

Note that you can use the Harvard^® Professional Mission & Quality-of-Life Time Log to zero-in on your interactions with your family, a client, a boss, a colleague or even a team, to address issues such as the cause(s) for stress, constant calls, interruptions or drop-in visits. For this purpose, log every interaction until you fill a couple of templates before conducting the analytic work.

Maintaining peak performance, since the pandemic will continue to be challenging and more so in virtual teams. But the good news is we are not helpless, thanks to the integration of the best practices and knowledge from neurosciences, systems thinking, self-leadership and applied mathematics. We can act to take control of our present and future, both at work and in our daily lives, by allocating, to what matters most, our most-important scarce and non-renewable resource, namely time. Thus, we can deliver promptly without hasting nor succombing to the arbitrary-deadlines' tyranny. How we think and act, or fail to act, about where our time goes, affects our career, physical health and ultimately our brain, impinging on our well-being and peace of mind.

The Harvard^® Professional Mission & Quality-of-Life Time Log and the patented Harvard^® Planner are two practical innovations and an integral part of Harvard University Global System^™, a dynamic ensemble of both strategic and day-to-day decision-support instruments, aimed at synergistic individual and teamwork. These two instruments help us concentrate on mission and important goals, work diligently and melt away superfluous distractions. The ultimate goal is to progress from time management to self-leadership; alleviate toxic stress; enhance restorative sleep; feel relaxed and think with clarity to innovate and indulge in more pleasurable endeavors.