Comparing Yourself to Yourself

Personal time figures cannot be compared between people. Almost every published comparison in this area ignores that. Organisations asking the same question at team level can compare their process with the consulting example: define the purpose, make the record visible to the people in it, and interpret time data alongside finished work rather than on its own.

Why external comparison fails

Nobody collects the same way. One person's "deep work" includes email triage, another's does not, and the difference is larger than any finding.

The reported figures are self-selected. People who publish their time data are people whose data flatters them.

Life circumstances dominate. Caring responsibilities, commute, health and job type swamp any difference attributable to method.

And the famous figures about how executives or writers spend their days are anecdotes, repeated until they acquired the texture of data.

What comparing yourself to yourself gives you

Change over comparable periods, which is the only thing you can act on.

Your own baseline, which is specific and honest.

And a fair test of an intervention: four weeks before, four weeks after, same measurement method.

That is the whole of legitimate analysis here.

Making the comparison fair

Same method both times. Switching from estimation to sampling will produce a change that is entirely instrumental.

Comparable periods: not December against October, not a week with a holiday against a normal one.

Four weeks minimum on each side, because a single week is dominated by whatever was unusual about it.

And state what else changed, because it always did, and attributing everything to your one intervention is the commonest error here.

The trend that matters

One figure, tracked over months, beats a dashboard.

Pick the one that corresponds to your actual question — longest stretch, hours on the thing you said mattered, days with no unscheduled time — and watch it.

Everything else can be collected and ignored, and most of it should be.

The discouragement problem

Personal time data is very good at making people feel bad.

A week with three hours of focused work looks damning until you notice that it was a normal week for your circumstances.

Which is why the baseline matters: without one, every figure is compared against an imagined standard, and the imagined standard is always higher.

Establish your own normal before judging any week against it.

When comparison is genuinely useful

Against your own estimate. The gap is real and informative.

Against the same period last year, if the method was the same.

Against what you committed to: if you said two days a week on a project and it was three hours, that is a finding.

All three are internal. None requires anybody else's numbers.

What to check

Is there a figure from someone else's week in your head right now?

Do you have a baseline, measured the same way?

Are the periods you are comparing actually comparable?

And is the one figure you watch the one that answers your question, or just the one your tool shows first?

Establish the baseline first

Without one, every week is judged against an imagined standard, and the imagined standard is always higher than any real week.

Measure your normal before judging anything against it.

Worth keeping in mind

Pick one figure that answers your question and watch that. Everything else can be collected and ignored, and most of it should be.

When comparison is useful

Against your own estimate, where the gap is real and informative.

Against the same period last year, if the method was the same. And against what you committed to: if you said two days a week and it was three hours, that is a finding. All three are internal and none needs anybody else's numbers.

In short

Personal time figures cannot be compared between people, because nobody collects the same way and life circumstances swamp any difference attributable to method.

Every external benchmark in this area produces discouragement and no information.

The point

Same method both times, comparable periods, four weeks either side, and a note of what else changed.

Without those the comparison measures the instrument rather than the intervention. For a complementary perspective on work, measurement or planning, consult Slack.