What does a novelist do all day? I tracked every minute for 6 months.

What do you want to know?

Hi Readers,

I’ve tracked how I spent every minute of my working hours for the last 6 months using Toggle Track. What do you want to know about what I do all day? Put your questions in the comments. I’ll analyze the data and respond in next Tuesday’s post.

A sample week of time tracked in mid-September

Let me share why I go to such lengths to track my time, and what I’ve already learned from this experiment.

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If you’re wondering how I ended up here, let me catch you up. I quit my trial lawyer job at a major law firm in March of this year. Since then, I’ve been a full-time writer. The money I make from writing is a drop in the bucket compared to my last job. But the sacrifice has been worthwhile to me.

When I reflect on the decade I spent training for and practicing law, I sometimes regret the lost time. I could be so much farther along as a creative writer if I had known myself well enough to start sooner.

But my legal training wasn’t without its gifts. Maybe the most surprising one: the ability to track how I spend my time. As lawyers, we live and die by six-minute increments, perpetually tracking our working hours through software that keeps a constant clock running in the background.

The process is relentless. We toggle between clients, switching the clock off for one client matter and on for another. This is how we bill clients, so we have to be extremely diligent and ethical about it. Onerous right?

It gets worse. Clients make us turn the clock on and off when we switch the type of task we’re doing for them. They want to know how long we are in meetings versus how long we spend drafting their motions or answering their phone calls. On a typical day, I’d record over a half dozen time entries each day representing different clients, and different tasks.

Worse still, each of those time entries had to include a written narrative justifying the time spent. A simple “3.7 hours drafting motion” wouldn’t cut it. Instead, I’d have to write: “Analyzed X case, for argument Y in Motion for Summary Judgment brief.” And “Meeting about X lawsuit” would never fly. I’d have to say stuff like “Strategized for oral argument before Judge X, considering outcome of recent case Y.”

If our time narratives weren’t clear, the client would contest the bill and refuse to pay. It seems shitty, but our billable rates were so high, I couldn’t blame them. My firm charged me out for over $1000 per hour. If I couldn’t explain what I did in a seven-person team meeting for .5 hours, the client would be paying the firm $500 for me to be in a meeting where I might have added less value than a potted plant. (Over $3.5K total for seven lawyers at my billable rate.)

All of this is to say: I found the miserly and soulless time-tracking responsibilities of being a lawyer very difficult. Because of ADHD, my mind naturally bounces between tasks, making it difficult to maintain the linear focus that precise time-tracking demands. I eventually figured it out through a combination of ADHD coping mechanisms and, frankly, ADHD meds. But it was one of the shittiest parts of my job.  

So, here’s the plot twist that surprised me when I quit law practice: I chose to keep tracking my time.

It’s because I transformed a lawyer’s time tracking system into something less oppressive and actually useful. For example, I noticed that my best creative work happens between the hours of 10am and 2pm. So now I guard that time like a dragon and refuse to schedule meetings or admin tasks during them.

Here’s what makes my current time-tracking valuable:  

• I can look back on my “unproductive” days and see where my time actually went;

• Patterns emerge that show which habits boost my productivity;

• I can plan realistically, knowing exactly how long tasks like writing Substack posts typically take;  

• Long-term projects become less daunting when I can see their true time commitments;

• I can quickly spot when certain activities are eating up too much time;

• I understand how my other roles (wife, mother, house manager) take from my working hours.

Also, in my version of time-tracking, I took out the soul-crushing parts. No lengthy narratives required. No client scrutiny. No justifying every six minutes. The data is purely for my own growth and efficiency.

I track all my potential “work” hours, which I define broadly as writing and anything that helps me be a better writer and grow my business. This includes weekdays from 8:30am-5pm when my son is in daycare (and not sick), after 8pm when he’s asleep, and weekend naps between 12:30-3pm. Some weekday and weekend evenings are taken up by my husband, because fortunately he likes me and wants to hang out.

A week in May when Zakir was home sick from daycare

And now that I have over six months of data to analyze, it’s time to dive in and find some insightful gems. Here are a few questions I’m looking to answer for myself:

• How much of my workweek goes to family and household management?  

• What was the true time investment for my novel’s first draft?

• What’s my weekly time commitment for Substack posts?  

• How much time goes into Substack infrastructure (marketing, community engagement, design)?

• What’s my time investment in learning writing craft?

• How do I balance work hours with exercise and self-care?

I plan to share these insights and more in next Tuesday’s post. Have something you’re curious about? Drop your question in the comments—I’ll make sure to include answers in my analysis.

Until next week,

Noor