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“Nowadays, tracking is a part of me - I track everything,” he says. Time tracking, he found, was a great motivator, as well as a way to organize his work, and it became a skill that he now uses every day while managing complex clinical-research projects for TASK. “It allowed me to put timelines of when I wanted to complete each chapter and allowed me to estimate timelines and log actual time spent against the estimate.” The app enabled him to generate reports detailing his performance, which led to his accountability levels increasing and his productivity improving “exponentially”. Then, “everything changed” when he tried an app called Jira - a tool developed by the software company Atlassian for collaboration across teams, but which he found ideal for his thesis writing. He started by blocking out times in his Google Calendar to work on his thesis, then tried different time-tracking apps, which helped him to focus. “Nobody spoke to me about time management,” says Mubaiwa, who gained his PhD this year and now works as a project manager for TASK, a clinical-research institute based in Cape Town, South Africa.

#Trackingtime downgrade how to#

How to accomplish that was something he had to work it out himself. It had been easy to focus in the lab, but he would now be writing off-campus while juggling a full-time job working as a warehouse pharmacist. “I had a lab notebook I completed every day, and I had a research plan, so I knew exactly what I needed to do, and when.”īut as Mubaiwa moved on to writing his doctoral thesis, managing his performance became a lot more complicated. “I spent 10 hours in the lab a day, 5 days a week,” the South African says. Credit: Mariam Al kassar/Shutterstockįor his PhD in drug design and development, Byron Mubaiwa found planning and executing his laboratory work a breeze.

Keeping track of time is key not only to working efficiently but also to maintaining a healthy work–life balance.