Academic time can feel as warped as in Wonderland: time tracking saved my mental health

Sounds like hyperbole, but time tracking helped me get a grip on calendar chaos, affirm the meaning of my work, and reclaim my personal time. This post collects snippets of my takes on time tracking, posted elsewhere online, into one handy reference.

Time tracking can help keep you from feeling like the pie chart of of your life has warped and fallen down the rabbit hole. (Image: B.G. Merkle ©2025)

There are unhealthy myths about how much time people in academia must spend working to be “successful.” People, on the whole, also tend to be terrible at estimating how much time we spend working, or on a particular task or activity. [1] We significantly overestimate, which feeds the myths of non-optional 80-hour weeks and fuels the frantic reality of people trying to achieve them. At the same time, we somehow anticipate that we will have more time in the future, so we also over-commit both current-self and later-self. The spiral of all this can feel a lot like falling down Alice’s rabbit hole [2] and winding up in a warped, incomprehensible lifestyle we didn’t ever intend to live.

I’m going to go out on a limb and say these myths persist because most academics resist a free, handy tool for getting a grip on calendar chaos: time tracking. (You probably just shuddered, didn’t you!?)

I suspect most of my colleagues (and many students) reject time tracking for some simple reasons:

• It feels like one more thing, and we are maxed.

• Tracking time feels like punching a time card. But, having a semblance of schedule autonomy is one of the few concrete benefits remaining to faculty, postdocs, and students. (Mind you, staff don’t have this freedom and they make the world go round.)

• We’re certain that we can’t remember to integrate it into our workflows.

• Fears that “what you track can and will be held against you.”

I understand these concerns. But, as someone who was once a newbie freelancer with no idea what to charge when someone wanted me to photograph an event or edit their journal article, I was forced to start time tracking years ago.

In those before-times, I needed to know how long certain types of work took me, so that I could provide potential clients with estimates that were fair to both of us and paid my bills. Having this information eased my concerns that I was under (or over) charging. But other than that, I typically invoiced by the project, not the hour, so I didn’t need a granular understanding of how I spent my time. What I needed was more paying clients and/or more paying projects from them. I said yes to everything that came along, establishing a deep-seated impulse to always add more to my plate.

Then, I thought of time tracking as a tool to ensure all those yeses turned into the scraps of income I needed.

Now, I think of time tracking as a mental health life raft for academics. One that helps me say no, so that the work I do does actually matter.

When I started working in academia, all the norms were fairly new to me. I had not intended to become an academic, and I had no training in most typical academic tasks. That meant I didn’t even have ball-park instincts for how long tasks and projects might take to plan, implement, finalize, etc.

I became chronically worried and stressed about whether I was really “doing my job” and how I would account for my time if someone ever asked me to. Because I was in a Research Scientist role (a faculty role like a lecturer, but with majority focus on research and creative work, not teaching), no one did. However, that no one ever asked how I spent my days did not relieve my concerns. I also worried I wasn't working “enough.” I was salaried with an endless pile of to-do lists, and I was haunted by the sense that I’d never get it all done.

After years of this stress, in late fall 2019, I resumed tracking my time. Because I wanted to know what I was actually doing with my time, I decided I would log a start and stop time every time I changed a task. Reconstructing that level of detail isn’t possible, even by the end of a day, and certainly not if you only document your time weekly. So, I needed to keep up that time logging as I went through my days.

Within one week I realized I wasn't focusing and finishing anything! Instead, I was switching tasks every 5-10 minutes. I was working, sure, but the choppiness of my workflow helped explain why I couldn't seem to clearly remember what work I'd done in a day. From then on, when I went to enter a stop time and switch to a new task, the act of seeing I’d only worked on something briefly helped me realize I should probably still keep working on the thing I was about to stop doing.

As I kept up the tracking, I quickly accumulated amazingly helpful information about my work habits:

1. I felt less guilty about taking the time off my contract allocates, once I knew how much I was working (short story: plenty).

2. I sunk an inordinate amount of time into teaching vs. the % it was (at the time) in my job description.

3. I spent another big chunk of my time on service/volunteer work that was (a) only supposed to be 5-10% of my work and (b) deeply devalued by academic prestige paradigms.

4. I did not actually spend 50% or more of my time in meetings, as I'd long resentfully assumed! But between meetings and emails, non-output activities were eating up close to 50% of my time.

The deeper I settled into this habit, the more interested I became in a wider array of stats about my time. I refined my spreadsheet to track the official parts of my job description (e.g., research, teaching, service, administration, professional development). Every entry I made had to fit into one of those bins; anything else was personal activities (like this blog!). I expanded the spreadsheet to also track specific types of work (product, meetings, program delivery-incl. teaching, emails, misc admin). Even later, I added columns to track big projects, special administrative appointments, my time on other people's grants, etc.

I will have been tracking like this for 6 years, come this November. It has radically changed how I work, for the better. I can see why some weeks or semesters I’m utterly exhausted halfway through. As much as possible, I embrace taking time off. I also have a little meter in front of me showing whether I'm making things or just frittering away time on email. (It has become a game, almost, to annually reduce the % of my time I spend on email and misc admin, and to raise up the % for products.) Having to enter exactly when I stop and start tasks has also massively helped me stay focused on projects long enough to get deep, meaningful work done on them. That means I make real progress, and complete things! Very satisfying.

All of these aspects of time tracking, along with resources I mention regularly, have helped my productivity and focus. Along with having a no buddy, no-te book, a set of “how to say no” scripts, and to-don’t list, time tracking has reined in my chronic impulse to say yes to every new thing that could help the university or my field. With my time tracking, I can no longer pretend that saying yes to something new still leaves me time to do everything else. Knowing how much time it takes me to create things like a journal article, a big grant, or complete a course redesign also gives me crystal clear information about what capacity I have to take on something new...and what I will likely need to sideline or totally cut if I start a new project, course, etc. Coupled with the values/mission discernment I write about often, and my to-don’t list, these auto-calculated time stats now tell me very directly whether the ways I spend my time align with what I really want to be doing. Put another way, I am much more realistic about how much work I can do at one time before quality and communication start to suffer, my sleep is negatively impacted, and the work takes over every cranny of my waking life.

I also no longer worry that I will not meet minimum expectations in my annual evals. While that was never actually a risk as I was decidedly overworking, I previously had no means of verifying that throughout the year. And so, reasonably, I was constantly stressed about it. Rather than arriving at the end of a year and holding my breath while I tally things up, now, I know (a) I am doing what it takes, because I have 6 years of data telling me what it takes! And (b) I can see in real time if the way I spend my time gets out of balance from my job description. Making necessary adjustments is much easier in the moment, rather than at review time.

Moreover, I have now pivoted to using my time tracking to reinforce my decisions about what I most value about my work. The saying has been repeated many times that academics/institutions value what they can count/track, and that tracking thus defines what we value. Coupled with the values/mission discernment I write about often, and my to-don’t list, these auto-calculated time stats now tell me very directly whether the ways I spend my time align with what I really want to be doing. My tracking spreadsheet now maps exactly onto the big project goals I have personally defined for my work. These are are then mapped onto columns reflecting the elements of my job description. In this way, the act of tracking my time, and the decision-making necessary to shape up a spreadsheet that tracks what I want to document, have become part of my iterative strategic planning and reflection. This process helps me affirm what I want to work on as an academic and that I am accomplishing those goals in ways that will also be legible to colleagues and adminstrators who review me.

These shifts in how I plan and track my work have massively improved my confidence that I am doing my job in a way that is meaningful to me. Knowing I’m doing good work that matters to me has enhanced my job satisfaction. Together, those improvements have also reduced my stress and bolstered my mental health.

I guess my real bottom line here is that time tracking as granularly as I do it puts me in the driver's seat, rather than the back seat. I am managing my work, not just hoping I get it done. That reframe is worth its weight in gold for my peace of mind and job satisfaction.

I was motivated to detail all this for you today because a couple of weeks ago, I was talking with a friend and colleague who runs professional development programs to support faculty and grad students. She was looking for advice about readings and tools to share with early career academics (PhD students, postdocs, new faculty, etc.) to help them navigate the extraordinary stressors and time demands of academic careers.

I can’t say that I think time tracking, on its own, will change someone’s experience of the dark sides of academia. But, coupled with articulating your own values/mission for your work in academia, and defining your own metrics of success, time tracking is part of my triad of tools to reinforce agency, job satisfaction, work-life harmony, and positive mental health. Because I think it’s so important, I require time tracking in my career prep course, and I’m strongly considering making it a month-long assignment in every course I teach from now on.

How about you?

Here's a direct link to a template of the time tracking spreadsheet I use. You’re welcome to download and modify it. You’ll need to update the Projects tab and may want to adjust/delete some of the column headers. Alternatively, other professionals use free apps like Toggl, my hours.com, various project management tools, or even more complex system of tracking and planning. Regardless of what method you use, if you try tracking your time, I’d love to hear how it goes.

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[1] Run a quick search in Google Scholar or Web of Science to find a lot of interesting papers on the subject of over-estimating time worked and under-estimating time needed for a work task. (Curiously, most of this research seems to be from the 1990s. I wonder if the advent of so many tracking apps, like fitness and phone usage apps, has improved people’s time estimation abilities nowadays.)

[2] Why yes, I am making bizzaro collages like the header image in this post. And I’m having a blast at it! As I discussed a while back—in a piece about word play and another about letting your imagination out of the box—collage, pottery, and weird poetry have offered me a lot of creative momentum during my sabbatical. I’m channeling that momentum back into my sabbatical projects, zany art, this blog, and more.

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P.S. You still have time to get 30% off of Teaching and Mentoring Writers in the Sciences! Just use the code UCPNEW. This is a labor of love I co-wrote with Stephen Heard to help folks in the sciences connect with the 50+ years’ of research on how to effectively teach writing. It comes out from University of Chicago Press on November 18th!