It’s February 1 (well, technically now February 2) and I just posted my January time sheet. A record for me. Nice to have it out of the way.

233 hours. Yikes. You want to know a disadvantage of a home office? That’s it. Way too easy to do time sheets at 11:30 pm. I normally do around 190 hours a month which is still a lot, but not completely insane. January was bad because of the program in San Francisco.

Good thing about a home office? The other day I got the girls off on the school bus at 8 am and I was still exhausted. I didn’t have any appointments or time critical tasks that had to be done right away so I laid back down and took a nap. Woke up at 10:15 am and then walked down the hall to “go to work.” Felt great. Try that with a “normal” job!

Oh, and after trying all different tools to keep track of my hours (because I’m terrible about tracking on a daily basis) I finally found a method that works well…my Outlook “Sent Items” folder! My job relies so heavily on email that I can tell exactly what I was doing for which project and for how long based on the email that I sent out each day. I also use the Tasks panel a lot so I modified a “Completed Tasks” view to group by date and show the Project. I try and remember to enter in the “Actual Work” hours before marking the task complete. Between the two views, I get a rather accurate picture of how I spent that day.