When you get off a habit, the best way to get back into it is often to just get to the root of it. The most basic, core, and fundamental part of what it means to your life.

When I got off time tracking during an extremely busy, highly interpersonal phase about a year ago, I had a pretty robust list. I was using my sixth version of time tracking at that point, which was pretty complex.

To get back into the habit, I went back to the roots -- which is just, simply, periodically writing down what time it is in the day, and what you did since the last update. Eventually that becomes making a note whenever you switch tasks, so you know exactly how much time you're spending on things.

Then, if you want to get more complex, you add some categories, and put some things on the sheet you want to do every day... but it's better not to jump in at that level, and to build some momentum first. That's described in "The Evolution of My Time/Habit/Life Tracking," which is still relevant from two years ago.

Recently, I just rebuilt my time-tracking sheet to reflect my newest habits, workflow patterns, and gains. It's working great. A little bit raw and needs some editing, but here's the newest --

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START OF DAY ROUTINE:
Time awake/total sleep: 
Appointments today: 
Other time-sensitive things: 
What are today's biggest dangers?
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TOP SIX ACTIVITIES + EXPECTED TIME:

1. 
2. 
3. 
4. 
5. 
6. 
--
Total Hours Planned: 
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QUICK CHECKLIST:
Time started: 
Vitamins, stretch, brush, breathe, posture: 
Borderlands, celerity, gratitude, life goals: 
Time complete: 
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ACCOMPLISHMENTS

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TIME TRACKING:

CATEGORIES:

Excel:
SM.com/Writing: 
[Company]: 
GGW: 
Health: 
Money:
People, focused:
Deals:
Organization:

Good:
Reading:
Family:
Relaxing:
People, general: 
Other opportunities:
TIme tracking, etc:

Okay:
Walking:
General-life:
Purposeless socializing/meetings/etc:
Semi-productive: 

Bad:
Internet surfing:
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ANALYSIS:

How did I do on my Top Six? 
What did I do right?
What did I do wrong?
What environmental factors affected me?
What would I do differently if I had the day to live over? 
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END OF DAY:
Income today: 
Expenses for the day (estimate)? 
Plan tomorrow: 
Make a request of my subconscious: 
Time complete: 
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Here's a filled out sheet --

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START OF DAY ROUTINE:
Time awake/total sleep: 11:35AM (5.5 hours + 5 hour nap previously = 10.5 hours)
Appointments today: Stepan 2PM, tentatively planning calls at 9PM
Other time-sensitive things: -
What are today's biggest dangers? Yesterday started great, but got off-track after I napped and woke to try to do service and sales. Food consumption got off-track too, as I ate a lot of peanuts… hopefully can mitigate both of those today.
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TOP SIX ACTIVITIES + EXPECTED TIME:
1. Writing, 2 hours?, 6PM to 9PM
2. Exercise, 30 minutes, Noon to 1PM including shower
3. Meet with Stepan, 2 hours?, 2PM to 4PM
4. Service/sales calls, 4 hours?, 9PM to 1AM -- half-done
5. Massage and get damage on feet fixed, 4PM to 6PM
6. Email -- answer [company] emails, then SM.com, and triage personal email, 30 minutes+, whenever
--
Total Hours Planned: 9 hours on work, 2 hours relaxation
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QUICK CHECKLIST:
Time started: 12:45PM
Vitamins, stretch, brush, breathe, posture: Yes except vitamins
Borderlands, celerity, gratitude, life goals: Yes
Time complete: 1PM
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ACCOMPLISHMENTS

Caught up on yesterday's time tracking, analyzed yesterday… interesting results. 
Went running
Good meeting with Stepan re: Company
Good email to W working towards sale yesterday and today, offered to set escrow up
All [company] email answered, all SM.com email answered
Got a massage, feeling much healthier/stronger now
Good session defining potential blog topics and theme
Trying to understand how to define "targeted demographics" -- some good gains here
Created a place to keep Metrics in Evernote
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TIME TRACKING:

12:20PM: (25 time-tracking, 10 general-opportunity, 10 surfing)

12:45PM: (25 surfing)

1:45PM: (40 health, 20 general-life)

2PM: (15 general-life)

2:20PM: Starting the solid part of work. (20 general-good)

4PM: (60 excel [company], 40 good-[company])

4:45PM: (20 socializing/people, 25 general-life)

7:30PM: (140 relaxing, 25 general-life)

8:35PM: (45 surfing, 20 semi-productive)

10PM: A great use of time defining and thinking about demographics, plans, topics, etc for the blog. I'm starting to lose steam and get tired… not sure how to deal with that. (70 SM.com excel, 15 general-life)

10:30PM: (30 SM.com excel, 30 semi-productive)

11:15PM: Not quite useless internet surfing, but close… really flagging on attention and energy. I think now is the time to call it a day on SM.com planning and demographics, and walk back to Pingguo and do sales. (45 semi-productive)

11:40PM: (25 general-life)

12:20AM: Did some quick organizing on metrics, added people to address book, made calls and emails. Taking a short break. (10 organization, 10 people, 20 [company])

Plan for right now --

*M first
*All other clients, as listed
*Hottest leads
*Go from there

1:40AM: (20 semi-productive, 20 surfing, 20 rest/nap)

1:45AM: I'm faded. (5 [company])

1:55AM: (10 time-tracking)

CATEGORIES:

Excel: 175 total

SM.com/Writing: 100
[company]: 125
GGW: 
Health: 40
Money:
People, focused:
Deals:
Organization: 10

Good: 285 total
Reading:
Family:
Relaxing: 140
People, general: 20
Other opportunities: 30 
Time tracking, etc: 35
Good-[company]: 40
Rest: 20

Okay: 235 total
Walking:
General-life: 120
Purposeless socializing/meetings/etc:
Semi-productive: 115

Bad: 55 total
Internet surfing: 55
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ANALYSIS:
How did I do on my Top Six? 5.5 / 6
What did I do right? A solid day, lots went right. 
What did I do wrong? Nothing in particular… since the end of yesterday was shot, that had negative carry-on into today, but I dealt with it well. I called it quits on sales/service relatively early, but I'm wrecked and don't want to risk repeating last night.
What environmental factors affected me? Not much.
What would I do differently if I had the day to live over? I'd do it basically the same.
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END OF DAY:
Income today: 0
Expenses for the day (estimate)? 48 RMB total (17 RMB -- food/green tea at Seven-Eleven, 25 RMB -- two coffee's at cafe, 6 RMB -- peanuts)
Plan tomorrow: Top six… exercise, write DRO post, finish SM.com planning, make a list of all "general stuff" to do and do many of those, look at Q4 goals, do Beijing winddown stuff, do work on "People" category
Make a request of my subconscious: Great sleep; awake refreshed
Time complete: 1:55AM
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Notes on new stuff in tracking:

I've added a question early in the day, "What are today's biggest dangers?" Often I find that in a short period of time, the same problems with recur. For instance, low energy or feeling too generally weak to lift weights... if that's anticipated, I could plan to go swimming or for a light jog instead of lifting. Or if there's been a lot of distraction in my office lately, I could do some work at the cafe. This question, early in the day, has been producing tremendous gains for me. Seriously, it's helping me pre-empt a ton of little tiny things that screw up valuable days.

TOP SIX ACTIVITIES + EXPECTED TIME: I'm now adding six activities that I most want to get done that day. Then I estimate the time they will take, and choose roughly when in the day I plan to do them. Later in the day, I analyze what my success% was at the six tasks. The question "Total Hours Planned" is a sanity-check: if it's over 10 hours into work, it's very unlikely to get done.

Time-tracking categories: Still too messy and need to be cleaned up, I added a bunch of new ones. The Excel categories map to things that have hard objectives and metrics for Q4 -- Oct/Nov/Dec. I'll write more about them later. In general, I have "stuff that's hard to do and quite productive" in my Excel categories... even though I think reading, relaxing, and time with family are as important if not more important than work, I'll naturally tend to gravitate and do those without effort. So I try to push my time up the ladder, knowing that those categories will get to a healthy amount without much active effort. If you were in a place where you weren't relaxing, reading, or spending time with your family, you might want to make those Excel categories... whereas if they're coming naturally, it's less critical to do.

ANALYSIS: I'm asking more negative questions lately for diagnosis, planning, and pre-emption. I used to avoid doing that, perhaps for some positivity kick? But lately, I've been analyzing risks, dangers, and problems, and getting a lot of gains out of it. It doesn't seem to have affected my levels of optimism or positivity... it's just pretty matter-of-fact. Noteworthy is, "What environmental factors affected me?" A television that's on, noisy people that are around, etc... this is a two-fold question. First, I shouldn't let environmental factors affect me. So, noticing them means I can either change the environment going forwards, or work on disciplining through the environment.

Finally, I moved from Assets/Income/Deals to "Income Today" only... which I don't know how I feel about that. My life corresponds pretty much to a lot of, "0... 0... 0... $12,500... 0..." etc. And often, the day the money comes in isn't the day the money is won. Still, it's something I want to pay attention to; I just haven't figured out the best way to do it.

If you want to get started on your own tracking, I'd strongly advise you to start simply -- the simplest version would be just periodically writing down what time it is and what you did most recently. I keep my notes in Evernote, which works nicely on OSX... I didn't like Evernote back when I used Windows, and I instead used a program called "MyLifeOrganized" for my time tracking. But, I started this all back on Notepad -- the tools don't matter as much as simply doing it.