Track Your Time To Gain More Control Of It

Every food truck owner I’ve spoken with always comments on the amount of time they spend managing their food truck. Since there are only 24 hours a day, you can always get better at managing the time you have. The best way to do this is to figure out what’s eating too much of it, track your time, and what could use more attention.

Track Your Time To Gain More Control Of It

Break down your work responsibilities into categories, and track your time and determine how much time you spend in each category every day:

Primary duties: Day-to-day tasks that define your job.
Managing: Have you hired employees for your food truck? Do you work collaboratively with them or do you have a manager? Log how much time this takes out of your schedule.
Admin tasks: The little things that seem to take too much of your time – emails, time sheets, event planning, etc.
Putting out fires: Interruptions. Urgent matters. Any last-minute issues that end up sabotaging even the best time-management plans.

Using a Day Timer to Track Your Time

Any time you reach for the stars, you need to ground yourself with a solid foundation. Putting together a strong planning system is no different. Your two building blocks of this foundation are the Task list and the Calendar, used to support the valuable information that organizes and schedules your daily activities.

Day Timer planner offers an outstanding tool for leveraging these elements to your benefit. By learning how you can better manage your Task list and Calendar you will get more things done each day and keep in control of the events in your life.

Find An App to Track Your Time

Tracking time as you work results than estimating time worked after the fact. When you know how you spend your time with high accuracy, you can analyze it and make smarter business decisions as a result. There are several apps that can help you get started.

While most time tracking apps let you record time on task in real time, meaning they give you a running clock from when you start a task, and you can pause or stop the app when you finish. The best apps will also let you correct time tracked after the fact. You should be able to edit the time entry to subtract the time you weren’t working.

The Bottom Line

How are you going to be spending your time next year? More work and less play? Monitor where all of your time goes to understand how to adjust your schedule in the future.

How do you track your time? Share your thoughts on this topic in the comment section, our food truck forum or social media. Facebook | Twitter

By Richard Myrick|2019-10-04T08:28:57-04:00Oct 4, 2019|Business|

About the Author: Richard Myrick

Richard Myrick is an architect by degree (Lawrence Technological University, Southfield, Michigan) who began his career in real estate development and architectural planning. In September of 2010 he created Mobile Cuisine Magazine to fill an information void he found when he began researching how to start a mobile hotdog cart in Chicago. Richard found that there was no central repository of mobile street food information anywhere on the internet, and with that, the idea for MCM was born. Richard also wrote the "Running a Food Truck for Dummies" available in bookstores everywhere and Amazon. You can reach out to Richard by email at: [email protected].