I was thinking today about productivity. Not in the abstract, but in the “what am I actually wasting time on?” kind of way. You know the drill—those little things that pile up and eat away at your day before you even realize it.

One of the big ones for me is time tracking. I’ve got a system where I jot down when I start and stop tasks, then convert that into decimal hours. It’s useful for billing clients, sure—but for non-client work, it’s probably overkill. I’m spending time tracking time that doesn’t need to be tracked. So I’m considering grouping all that non-client time into a single bucket or just dropping it altogether. If it’s not billable and it’s not helping me improve something, maybe I don’t need to measure it so precisely.

Another area ripe for improvement is email. I spend way too much time deleting cold sales pitches and marketing junk. I’ve been thinking about using AI or smarter filtering tools to organize my inbox so I only see the important stuff each day. If I could automate that triage—maybe flag client emails, filter out the noise, and surface anything urgent—I’d save a ton of time and mental energy.

If you’ve got any favorite automation tricks or productivity hacks—especially in Access or VBA—I’d love to hear them.