Everyone has blind spots, whether or not they realize what they are is a different story. For me, my biggest one is tracking how much time I spend on a particular task. Usually this is because I am mass-multitasking and the lines between tasks blur or because the schedule I’m to report against is garbage.

Recognizing this issue is something that will continue to bite me in the butt I started recording what I am doing in 15 minute blocks in a weekly planner. This worked great on the days that I remembered to follow my own system (which I think I had about a 90% compliance rate). The problem with the planner is that there is a finite number of pages in it before you need to buy a new one. The problem is compounded when you run out of pages and its nowhere close to payday.

The Internet to the rescue (sorta). Knowing that everything you could ever want (and most things you wouldn’t) is online somewhere, I found a few templates for planners that would more or less do what I wanted. Most however were using the Excel built-in autoformatters so I could not tweak it to my own needs. So taking that as inspiration, I built my own.

The new timesheet I am going to start using this week can be found here. While it does have some formatting, it is done manually and not with an autoformatter so it can be easily tailored. It’s also on legal size paper which is a bit of a pain, but it covers 7AM to 1AM (I figure if I’m still working at 1AM there is something seriously wrong) in 15 minute blocks. The days of the week can be reordered too. Currently the ‘week’ starts at Saturday as that is how things are tracked at my primary job these days.

I tend to print these out as that is how I work, but you could easily clone each work sheet and have an electronic record of what you have done as well.

Just making this available if someone else has a similar need.