"I am Human Optimization"

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After you read this you'll never think about your calendar in the same way. 

Why? Because I'm going to show you just how much of your day is being wasted. I was genuinely shocked to see how many hours were just blank once I started tracking them, but let's back up and start at the beginning. 

I'm an avid listener to the podcast My First Million hosted by Shaan Puri and Sam Parr. Both are founders that have sold their companies, hence the name of the podcast which is now part of the Hubspot Podcast Network. 

One of their most popular episodes to date was with skater and business mogul, Rob Dyrdek. If you don't know Rob I'm willing to bet you could turn on MTV right now and there is a good chance his show, Ridiculousness will be playing. 

I encourage you to go listen to or watch episode #224 of My First Million where Shaan and Sam interview Rob. It's titled 'How Tracking Every Second of His Life Took Rob Dyrdek from 0 to $405M in Exits' and that title is the entire purpose behind this plug-in I've built for your Google Calendar.

Watch Episode #224 of My First Million with guest, Rob Dyrdek

Essentially Rob learned that he needed discipline in his life to run multiple businesses, first profitably then successfully. He requested that a calendar tracker be built specifically for him to track every hour of his day and output a simple analysis about how his time was being spent. This allowed him to engineer his life in the way he saw fit to not only accomplish his aspirations in business, but also remain healthy and be an attentive husband and father. You can watch the full overview here in episode #224 where he explains what he was looking for when he decided to start tracking is hours:

How Rob tracks his time with custom scripts

This specific section got such an overwhelming response from listeners that Sam reached out to Rob to get details about the tracker which he ended up posting in this tweet: 

This started as me wanting to try this for myself. So I learned some best practices and coding within Google Sheets and tried it out. After a couple iterations and a few months of tracking my calendar with these new meeting titles and prompts I was astonished by the results. 

There was roughly about six hours per day on average during the work week that I could not account for. I work part-time at my employer of seven years after taking a step back to continue scaling my own custom furniture and product design business. You'd think every hour of every day would be easy to account for between those two focuses, my marriage, my health goals, and my sleep schedule. But surprisingly I found that I was wasting what resulted in a huge amount of time every week. This provided me the data to make some changes and I can say that after about six months I'm using my time much more wisely. 

Now, this isn't just another 'productivity increase' product that you'll be excited about initially but then lose interest with over a short amount of time. I don't necessarily think we need to be more productive with our days. But I do think it's important to know where your time is going and once it's laid out in a dashboard have the ability to ask "Is this what I want this to look like? Do I need to make some changes?" If nothing else, this will allow you to identify that time how you're spending your day in a simple, tangible way.

Are these gaps in your day used as "Creative Time?" Do you just need some practice in identifying how you use the time and you are in fact using it wisely? This plug-in will help answer those questions and hopefully will provide some clarity in your daily, monthly, and yearly life. 

Full instructions of how to use the plug-in and link it to your Google Calendar will be provided with the download. 

After trying this for a while, if you've got feedback about improvements, things that are missing, additional features you'd like to see, or just that you are loving the product I would really like to hear from you.

Buy this Google Calendar Plug-In

Enjoy!