Tom's Blog on Life

If you want to improve your time management, the very first thing to do is to ‘come off automatic’, to start to make conscious, deliberate decisions about where you invest your daily minutes rather than just ‘going with the flow’.

To help do this I recommend you take stock of where you are investing your time at present. This is one of the highest-leverage things a person can do. Most people feel short of time but have never actually measured where it goes.

There is an old management principle often attributed to Peter Drucker, “What gets measured gets managed.”

Time tracking is useful because it often reveals:
hidden time drains
context-switching costs
optimistic self-estimates
emotional avoidance patterns
and activities that give very poor return for the time invested

A practical system usually works best when it combines:
1. Measurement
2. Classification
3. Review
4. Adjustment

Here are some tools and methods, from simplest to most sophisticated.

1. The Notebook Method (Surprisingly Effective)

Carry a notebook or use a notes app.

Every 15–30 minutes, write:
time
activity
optional energy/mood score

Example:
7:00–7:30 Breakfast + news
7:30–8:10 Emails
8:10–9:40 Deep work: proposal
9:40–10:15 YouTube drift

This works because:
it is frictionless
creates awareness
and immediately reduces unconscious behaviour

A variation is to use categories:
Work
Admin
Learning
Family
Entertainment
Exercise
Social media
Travel
Sleep

2. Spreadsheet Tracking

Good for analytical personalities.

Columns:
| Start | End | Activity | Category | Energy | Value |
| —– | — | ——– | ——– | —— | —– |

Additional useful ratings:
Importance (1–5)
Enjoyment (1–5)
Return on Time (low/medium/high)

After a week, patterns emerge quickly.

Many people discover:
2–4 hours/day vanish into reactive behaviour
interruptions are worse than expected
high-value work occupies surprisingly little time

3. Pomodoro + Logging

The Pomodoro Technique combines:
focused work blocks
timed breaks
and implicit tracking

Typical structure:
25 minutes focused work
5 minute break
after 4 cycles take a longer break

Each completed session is logged.

Advantages:
improves focus
creates measurable output
helps estimate real task duration

4. Digital Time Tracking Apps

These automate much of the process.

Popular tools include:

[Toggl Track](https://toggl.com/track/)
Excellent for manual time tracking and reporting.

[RescueTime](https://www.rescuetime.com/)
Automatically tracks computer/app usage.

[Clockify](https://clockify.me/)
Free and strong for projects/categories.

[Timeular](https://timeular.com/)
Physical tracking device + app.

[Forest](https://www.forestapp.cc/)
Gamifies focus sessions.

[Notion](https://www.notion.so/)
Flexible dashboards and habit/time systems.

[Obsidian](https://obsidian.md/)
Powerful for reflective tracking and journaling.

5. Passive Digital Tracking

Sometimes people resist logging manually.

Passive monitoring tools reveal:
websites visited
app usage
screen time
pickup frequency
notification interruptions

Useful built-ins:

[Apple Screen Time](https://support.apple.com/en-au/guide/iphone/iphb0c7313c9/ios)
[Android Digital Wellbeing](https://wellbeing.google/)
Browser extensions like:

[StayFocusd](https://www.stayfocusd.com/)
[LeechBlock NG](https://www.proginosko.com/leechblock/)

These are particularly valuable because self-estimates of screen usage are often wildly inaccurate.

6. Energy Tracking (Often More Important Than Time)

Two people can both work 8 hours:
one produces enormous value,
the other burns time inefficiently.

So some systems track:
energy
clarity
motivation
stress
cognitive sharpness

Example:
| Time | Activity | Energy |
| —- | ——– | —— |
| 8am | Writing | 9/10 |
| 2pm | Admin | 4/10 |

Patterns emerge:
best creative hours
best analytical hours
when breaks are needed
what activities drain energy

This can radically improve scheduling.

7. Outcome-Based Tracking

This is more advanced. Instead of tracking “How long did I work?” track “What meaningful outcomes were produced?”

Examples:
pages written
sales calls completed
designs finished
exercise sessions done
lessons learned
problems solved

This prevents:

“productive-looking busyness.”

8. Weekly Review Systems

Tracking alone is not enough. The real gains come from review. A weekly review might ask:
What consumed the most time?
What created the most value?
What felt wasteful?
What should be automated?
What should be delegated?
What should be eliminated?
Which activities restored energy?
Which drained it?

Without review, people often collect data but change nothing.

9. Time Auditing Categories

A useful framework is to classify activities into:

| Category | Meaning |
| ———– | —————————— |
| Investment | Builds future capability/value |
| Maintenance | Necessary upkeep |
| Consumption | Entertainment/rest |
| Waste | Little or no value |

The goal is not eliminating all consumption:
rest
recreation
socialising
and reflection
as these are essential

The goal is reducing unconscious waste.

10. Environmental Design

One of the strongest insights in behaviour management is:
people often do not need more discipline — they need better environments.

Examples:

phone in another room
website blockers
scheduled email windows
prepared workspace
default routines
checklists
batching similar tasks

This aligns closely with creating systems that channel behaviour toward optimum outcomes rather than relying on continual willpower.

11. Common Discoveries People Make

After tracking for 1–2 weeks, people commonly discover:

interruptions are devastating
multitasking is inefficient
small distractions accumulate enormously
reactive communication dominates the day
sleep affects productivity more than expected
and a few activities generate most results

Often the solution is not “work harder” but “remove friction and low-value activity.”

12. A Very Simple Starter System

If someone is overwhelmed, I would suggest:

For 7 days:
Track only:
Start time
End time
Activity

Then review:
What surprised you?
What should increase?
What should decrease?

Simple systems are far more likely to be sustained. Overly elaborate systems often collapse under their own administration overhead.

It was the summer of 1876, and Sandford Fleming was stranded.

He stood in a small railway station in Ireland, staring at a schedule that had cost him everything: his connection, his plans, and now his evening. The timetable clearly listed the train to Londonderry at 5:35. What it failed to mention was that it meant morning, not afternoon. By the time Fleming arrived expecting an afternoon departure, the train had been gone for hours./p>

A printing error. Two tiny letters — a.m. written as p.m. — and here he was, settling into an uncomfortable waiting room for what would become a very long night.

Most people would have cursed, written an angry letter, and moved on.

Fleming was not most people.

He was already one of Canada’s most accomplished engineers — a Scottish immigrant who had arrived at eighteen with little more than ambition and a surveyor’s training, and built a career designing railways, postage stamps, and even an early prototype of inline skates. But as he sat in that cold Irish station, watching the hours drag by, something larger began forming in his mind.

The missed train wasn’t really about a printing error.

It was about a broken world.

In the 1870s, virtually every town on Earth kept its own time, set by when the sun reached its highest point in the sky. This had worked perfectly for centuries, when most people never traveled far from home. But railways had changed everything. A train could now carry passengers hundreds of miles in a day, through dozens of towns each ticking away on their own local clocks. In North America alone, there were more than one hundred different local times in use. A traveler crossing the continent needed to reset their watch at nearly every stop.

Railway companies had tried to solve this by creating their own “railroad time” — but with dozens of competing lines, this only created more confusion. Some major stations displayed several clocks at once, each showing a different time for a different railway. Trains occasionally collided because engineers were operating on different standards. Scientists couldn’t coordinate astronomical observations because observers in different cities couldn’t agree on what time an event had occurred.

The world had built a modern transportation system on top of a medieval approach to time.

Fleming spent that long night in Ireland thinking. And then he spent the next several years doing something about it.

He proposed dividing the entire world into twenty-four time zones — one for each hour of the day — each spanning fifteen degrees of longitude. Within each zone, every clock would show the same time. Between zones, the difference would always be exactly one hour. The zones would be labeled alphabetically, A through Y, with G designating the zone aligned with Greenwich, England.

To prove the concept was real, not just theoretical, Fleming commissioned a custom pocket watch around 1880 — now held at the Smithsonian’s American History Museum. One side showed conventional 12-hour time. The other showed his new 24-hour “Cosmic Time” system, with alphabetical zone markers. He carried his solution in his pocket.

He spent years as an evangelist for the idea: presenting papers at international conferences, lobbying railway companies, and building a coalition of scientists, engineers, and government officials across the globe. In November 1883 — a day that became known as “The Day of Two Noons” — American and Canadian railways simultaneously synchronized their clocks to four standardized continental time zones. Some cities experienced noon twice that day as the old system gave way to the new.

The following year, forty-one delegates from twenty-five nations gathered in Washington, D.C., for the International Meridian Conference. After considerable debate, twenty-two nations voted to adopt the meridian passing through the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, England, as the global standard for zero degrees longitude — the foundation of the system we use today.

Fleming’s original dream of a single universal “Cosmic Time” was never adopted. But his framework of twenty-four hourly zones became the backbone of modern Coordinated Universal Time. His alphabetical zone labels survived too: in aviation and the military, “Zulu Time” — Z for zero meridian — remains the global standard.

The man who missed a train because of two wrong letters had given the world a common language for time itself.

Today, when you check what time it is in another country, when airlines synchronize international schedules, when financial markets trade across continents in real time — all of it traces back to one long, uncomfortable night in an Irish railway station, and a man who refused to accept that the problem was simply bad luck.

He was the wrong person to strand in a waiting room.

He had too much time to think.

1986. Nottingham, England.

Margaret Humphreys is a social worker. She is not famous. She has no political connections, no private funding, and no reason to believe that a single letter from a stranger in Australia is about to change her life forever.

The letter is from a woman who says that at the age of 4, she was placed on a boat by the British government and shipped to a children’s home in Australia. She was told her parents were dead. She grew up an orphan on the other side of the world.

Now she is an adult. She wants to know if any of her family is still out there.

Humphreys agrees to investigate. She expects to spend a few weeks searching records and confirming what the woman already suspects — that her parents are gone.

Instead, she finds the woman’s mother. Alive. Living less than an hour from Nottingham.

The woman’s parents were never dead. They were never even told where their child had been sent.

The Secret That Had Been Hidden in Plain Sight.

Humphreys begins pulling on the thread. What unravels is one of the most shocking government programmes in British history.

For over 100 years – from the 1860s all the way to 1970 – the British government and a network of charities and religious organisations had been systematically removing children from care homes and shipping them to Australia, Canada, and other Commonwealth nations. The children were told they were orphans being given a better life.

Most of them were not orphans. They had living parents. They had siblings still in England.

They had families who had surrendered them temporarily during times of poverty or illness, fully expecting to be reunited.

Nobody told the parents where their children went. Nobody told the children their parents were alive.

More than 130,000 children were transported. The youngest were as young as 3 years old.

Here’s what makes it worse, many of the institutions receiving these children in Australia were run by religious orders who used the children as cheap labour. Boys worked farm fields from before sunrise. Girls cleaned and cooked for institutions that kept them entirely cut off from the outside world. Some were denied any education at all. Investigators would later describe what happened in those institutions as “widespread and systematic sexual abuse.”

The children were told they were the sons and daughters of whores. That they were worthless.

That nobody back in England loved them or wanted them back.

Many of them believed it for the rest of their lives.

1987. Humphreys’ Living Room, Nottingham.

After traveling to Australia and posting newspaper advertisements asking for former child migrants to come forward, Humphreys is overwhelmed by the response. At first it is a trickle.

Then it becomes thousands.

She establishes the Child Migrants Trust – initially from her own home, with her husband Mervyn as her closest support – and registers it as a charity in both Australia and Britain.

She has no government backing. No institutional support. The organisations responsible for the scheme – including powerful church bodies and charities – are not remotely pleased to see her digging.

She faces legal pressure. She faces institutional stonewalling. Files go missing. Doors are closed. She is one social worker from Nottingham going up against organisations that have decades of experience in making things disappear.

She does not stop.

The Work.

For the next 23 years, Humphreys travels constantly between Nottingham, Western Australia, and Victoria, combing through emigration records, church ledgers, government archives, and institutional files that were never designed to be found by people like her.

She reunites more than 1,000 individuals with their biological families in those first decades alone. Every reunion is its own extraordinary story. Elderly parents meet children they last saw as toddlers. Brothers and sisters discover each other after 40 or 50 years of believing the other was gone. Middle-aged adults finally learn their own real names.

Some of those parents are in their 80s and 90s by the time Humphreys reaches them. Some die before she can bring their children home.

In 1993, the Australian government awards her the Medal of the Order of Australia – one of the country’s highest civilian honours – for her services on behalf of the child migrants.

In 1994, she publishes her full account in a book called Empty Cradles. It causes a national outcry in Britain.

The Apologies.

It takes 23 years of campaigning to force a government to say sorry.

In 2009, the Australian government issues a formal national apology to all former child migrants for the suffering caused by the scheme.

In 2010, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown stands before Parliament and delivers an official apology on behalf of the United Kingdom. He acknowledges the “misguided” programme that unjustly broke up thousands of families and caused immeasurable harm to the children caught inside it.

A few years later, Humphreys is appointed CBE – Commander of the British Empire. The same empire that once shipped children across the world to serve it.

The film Oranges and Sunshine, released in 2010 and starring Emily Watson as Humphreys, brings the story to a global audience for the very first time.

What She Found When She Started Pulling That Thread.

Margaret Humphreys was not a detective. She was not a barrister or a politician or a crusading journalist. She was a social worker who opened a letter and decided that the person inside it deserved to know the truth.

She found over 130,000 reasons why that decision mattered.

The Trust she built from her living room is still operating today – still reuniting families, still supporting survivors, still running offices in England and Australia. Because the work is not finished. Some of those stolen children are still searching. Some are still waiting.

1 letter. 1 social worker. 1 decision to follow the truth wherever it led.

Share this with someone who believes that ordinary people can change the world – because Margaret Humphreys proves it, 1 family at a time.

He played Wolverine. But most people who drink his coffee don’t know he founded the company—or why.

2009.Yirgacheffe, Ethiopia.

Hugh Jackman landed at a small airstrip in the highlands of southern Ethiopia.

He was 40 years old. He was the most famous Australian actor in the world. He’d played Wolverine in four X-Men films. He’d won a Tony Award on Broadway. He’d hosted the Academy Awards a few months earlier.

He was in Ethiopia as an ambassador for World Vision.

He’d come to make a short documentary about a community development project.

He hadn’t come to meet anyone in particular.

The Land Rover drove him and his wife Deborra-Lee Furness six hours into the highlands, to the Yirgacheffe region.

Yirgacheffe is the birthplace of coffee.

The Land Rover stopped at a small farm. Two hectares. The house had dirt floors and no electricity.

The farmer was 27 years old.

His name was Dukale.

He had a wife named Adanech and five children. His oldest son was five years old.

His name was Elias.

Hugh asked if he could spend the day working with Dukale.

Dukale said yes.

They started at dawn.

They planted seedlings together. They worked the soil. Dukale showed Hugh how a coffee tree grows. He showed him the careful shade-growing technique he used. He showed him the small drying patio where he laid the beans out to dry in the sun.

Hugh listened.

Dukale told him about the price of coffee.

Coffee farmers in Ethiopia received 1 to 2 percent of the final retail price of the coffee they grew.

The other 98 percent went to middlemen, exporters, roasters, and grocery chains.

A farmer like Dukale could work 12 hours a day for a year and still not have enough money to send his children to school.

Dukale told Hugh he had a dream.

He wanted Elias to be educated.

He wanted all five of his children to be educated.

Before Hugh left that evening, he and Dukale planted two more trees together.

They named them after Hugh’s children.

Oscar. Ava.

Hugh promised Dukale he would come back. He promised he would do something.

He didn’t know yet what.

He flew back to New York.

He couldn’t stop thinking about Dukale.

A few months later, he gave a speech at UN Climate Week. He stood in front of presidents and prime ministers and made a pleading case for the world’s coffee farmers.

He said the words “fair trade“ twenty-five times.

He told them about Dukale.

He flew home from the UN.

He realized a speech wasn’t enough.

In 2011, Hugh Jackman opened a small coffee shop in Tribeca, New York.

He called it Laughing Man Coffee & Tea.

He had one rule.

100 percent of his personal profits from the company would go to the Laughing Man Foundation.

The foundation would fund education, water wells, and agricultural training in coffee-growing communities.

The first community it would fund was Dukale’s.

The cafe bought Dukale’s beans directly. It paid him a fair-trade price.

The most popular blend on the menu was called Dukale’s Dream.

It still is.

In 2015, Hugh signed a partnership with Keurig.

Dukale’s blend went into K-Cups.

The coffee Dukale grew on his 2-hectare farm in the Ethiopian highlands started being brewed in homes across America.

By 2024, Laughing Man Coffee had grown into a national brand.

Two cafes in Manhattan. Bagged products in over 6,000 grocery stores. A wholesale program serving hundreds of restaurants and offices.

Every cent of Hugh’s personal profits has continued to go to the foundation.

The foundation has now funded education and infrastructure programs in seven countries.

It has helped over 1,000 coffee-farming families lift themselves out of extreme poverty.

It has built schools.

The trees Hugh and Dukale planted together in 2009 are now 16 years old.

They’re bearing fruit.

The coffee beans from the Oscar tree and the Ava tree—named after Hugh’s children—are sold in the Tribeca cafe.

Dukale himself is now 43 years old.

He’s expanded his farm. He’s bought more land. He’s opened his own cafe in his own town.

He’s built a larger house for his family with a tin roof and electricity.

His son Elias is in college.

Elias is the first member of the Dukale family to attend college in five generations.

Hugh Jackman has continued, in the 16 years since that afternoon in Yirgacheffe, to act, sing, and tour.

He returned as Wolverine in “Deadpool & Wolverine“ in July 2024. The film grossed $1.3 billion worldwide.

He won his second Tony in 2022.

He hasn’t been back to Ethiopia since 2009.

He’s said in interviews, more than once, that he’s been waiting for his own children to be old enough to travel with him to meet Dukale.

Oscar and Ava are now 25 and 19.

He’s told a reporter that the trip is on the calendar.

There are now two Laughing Man cafes in Manhattan.

The walls of both of them are decorated with photographs of Dukale and his family.

There are no photographs of Hugh.

He designed it that way.

Most of the customers who come in for a flat white in the morning don’t know that the cafe was founded by the man who played Wolverine.

They don’t need to know.

The coffee is excellent. The price is fair. The beans were grown by a farmer in the Ethiopian highlands who’s now able to send his children to school.

That’s enough.