Where my PM day goes

From time to time I try to track my productivity to get a clue what tasks my work time is spent on. Project Manager usually has a lot to do during the business day and sometimes analysis of the workload is good to avoid non-management activities. You know what I mean... Not to forget delegating tasks that are not inherent in PM's schedule like operational routine. 

I decided to do this after I caught myself updating some manual for a new version of some software instead of diving into a scope planning of the delayed but vital project. 

As my Company requires the employees to report their tasks daily in a special time-tracking system it was not a big deal to retrieve data and visualize my recent week in a pie chart. And here is what I got:

To have better understanding of my tasks I also use a free time-capture tool RescueTime that lets me keep track of the time I spend on various activities, so I can have an accurate idea of where my day goes :). 

Here is one of the days of my recent closed week: 

So, ~6 hours were spent in front of the PC monitor. And most time is communication. Do you know what part of a PM's activity communicating takes? 80-90% of all time. Not odd that Skype and MS Outlook take so much time. Usually, I work 7-9 hours daily and 1-2 hours are taken up by face-to-face communication with a team. Time capture software does not calculate these activities.  

Also, I rate my activities with a 'productivity rank', which shows whether that activity is a productive or distracting use of my time. This subjective measure is used to calculate my "productivity pulse", a metric from 1-100 that gives me a quick picture to understand how my day goes. I noticed that my productivity pulse rises (up to 93) and falls (down to 60) throughout the day:

The main idea to have a correct working day picture is to set time categories up to your workflows. Even 3 months after I started to use RecueTime I still revise categories to arrange them up to my needs. The tool is my individual assistant. None can see the details. Hence, there is no need to delude myself. Moreover, it helped me to detect my personal issues in time management.

Let's look at my activity proportions over 2013 and how they map to the project management processes. 

As you can see, there are Research & BA, Trainings, and Presentations that come alone in the pie chart. I wanted to get an idea how much time is spent on these specific activities. The main peculiarity of my projects is that they require a manager to be in both qualities: as a project manager and a business analyst. Sometimes I even should play a SME role for my customer due to my solid experience in insurance.  Frankly speaking I get much fun with all this stuff.

Also, one thing that may be interesting: 4 of 10 products that we were working on during the last year were created from green field and have become great assets to the end-users.