If you’re in (most of) the United States, your clock “sprung ahead” this weekend. Our friends in Europe will have the same experience in a couple of weeks.

It’s always a huge bummer for people — we either lose an hour of our Saturday night or we end up losing an hour in the morning, getting less sleep. At least if you’re a parent, your kids probably “slept in,” even if you didn’t.

But even though we talk a lot about time loss now, we rarely consider how many hours we lose the rest of the year.

Lost hours to:

• Work we don’t need to do.
• Getting sucked into endless scrolling or futile social media fights.
• A client or potential customer hurtling into our inbox and demanding we do things on their schedule.

When you think about it, the one lost hour for Daylight Saving Time pales in comparison to the number of hours we lose to these things each week.

But just as we get that hour back in October, there are a few ways for us to get our time back — we just need to know where to look.

Once we do that, we can start eliminating some of those distractions.

Where to Look

I’ve been giving this advice for a while now — audit your time. But it wasn’t until I had a call with someone last week that I learned audit your time is an unclear instruction.

Sometimes when you’re suggesting stuff like, audit your time…a lot of people won’t have a clue how to do that.

I fell into a typical “expert” trap I thought I learned to avoid: something that seems so obvious to me is unclear or confusing to the very people I’m trying to help.

So I set out to make it easier by coming up with a simple process for doing it.

The Process for Gaining Back Time

First, here’s the process:

1. Pick 3 tasks you need to accomplish each day and write them down. These are the non-negotiable tasks. Do not pick more than 3.
2. Halfway through the day, check in with yourself. How are you progressing? What are you struggling with? What is distracting you?
3. At the end of the day, check in again and write down how it went. Did you accomplish everything? If so, what helped you do it? If not, what got in your way?

You should set reminders for all 3 to make sure you do them. Treat them as a work or task journal.

Do this for a week or two and you should have a good grasp on how you’re spending time.

I Built an App to Help With This

Using this process, I wanted to try my hand at something I’ve never done: build an iOS app.

I was recently sick with strep throat and laid up in bed. So I decided to use some of that downtime to hook up Codex to Xcode, and see if I could actually make it happen.

It worked really well. I built an app called Daily Three, based on this exact process. You can set times for the notifications/reminders, and it has some widgets so you always see your three tasks.

Crucially, it includes an archive for you to review past entries, and Shortcuts support for you to get the info out of the app.

The app helped me really solidify this process too; I had to think through how it would be used, the contexts where it would be used, and what people might want to do with the info.

It’s not quite ready for primetime yet. While building the app was fairly straightforward, getting an Apple Developer Account for my business is not. But I do intend to release this on TestFlight at least, for readers and potential clients.

For now, you can easily do this with your favorite notes or journaling app. Once you start doing this, I’m fully confident you will learn a TON — not only about what distracts you, but about how and when you get your best work done.

And let me know: do you already do something like this? Reply and tell me how it’s going!