I love this new addition to my time tracking routine, courtesy of author and Study Hack maven Cal Newport: the tally system.
It’s extremely simple. Identify a core task. Put a tally mark down for each uninterrupted hour you spend on that core task.
For me, my only task right now is studying for the California bar exam. I’ve got four weeks left and a lot yet to memorize. The best way to learn this stuff is repetition. That requires that you put in a lot of hours.
The tally marks make it extremely easy to keep track of the hours, and gives you an easy visual metric to compare how you’re doing each day, week, or month, depending on how you set it up.
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