How I spent my time in 2011

Last week I audited how I spent my active hours (approx. 9am-7pm) in 2011.

I experienced some fairly major life changes throughout the year, and the report I put together is definitely more characteristic of the last 6 months (when I had settled into a routine) rather than the entire year.

Here’s a diagram illustrating my activities:

And here are some of my observations and thoughts:

  1. Only 23% of my time is directly generating income. Hopefully this will change next year as ventures come to fruition.
  2. Half my normal work time is non-billable.I spend as much time on tasks such as administration as I do on contract work.
  3. My weekends and holidays are not my own! That 25% Personal time should be closer to 30%. (To be fair, this is probably my own fault.)
  4. I spend a lot of time on Let’s Make Games Inc. An unsustainable amount really, but we’re becoming much more efficient.

No real surprises I suppose. The audit was a lot more detailed (down to individual projects), but this high-level review is probably the most important.

Overall, I’m rather happy with how I spent my time. I feel like 2011 was about laying a lot of foundations to be built upon in future. Many of those foundations are relationships, and I’ll be depending on a lot of people to help take Let’s Make Games, Hungry Sky, and various ventures forward together with me.

It’s very fulfilling to be working with people I believe in, in pursuit of projects I’m passionate about, and I’m glad that I put in the time to get things started.

My goals for this year are to:

  1. Increase Personal time to around 34%. This should come naturally with the imminent arrival of my first child. 🙂
  2. Reduce Let’s Make Games Inc. time to around 13%. We’re not setting up anymore, so this should be possible!
  3. Reduce non-billable hours to around 15%. That’ll make it around 35% of my normal work time, rather than 50%.
  4. Start making money from some of these ventures. This isn’t directly time related, but it will help with time justification!

So that was 2011 in pie chart and bullet point form. I’ll be posting some photos from the year as well… which may be more interesting for most people. 😉