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Have you ever had one of those days or maybe even a full week when felt really busy the whole time…but when it was over, you were like – what did I actually accomplish?
I know I have…and I’m guessing you have too.
The truth is – you probably accomplished a ton, but you weren’t even aware of it because you were just so busy.
The bigger question (and the more interesting question) is – how do you know if you were really working on the RIGHT things…or if you were unintentionally falling into bad habits or wasting your time on unimportant, low-value work.
These are really good questions. And a time audit can answer all of them. I’m going to be doing a time audit myself in the coming months so I thought I would take you along for the journey.
In this video, I’m walking you through exactly what a time audit is and why it’s such a valuable process. I’ll also explain exactly how to do it and what I’m going to use to make the process a little easier. And be sure to stay until the end, because I’ll tell you how to get my free downloadable reflection worksheet to help make the most of your time audit.
Hi I’m Chrissy Scivicque, professional development trainer and founder of Eat Your Career dot com helping you create a nourishing professional life. I train on topics related to time management, project management, process improvement – basically all the stuff that helps professionals do more and do better.
And that’s exactly what a time audit is all about. Doing more and doing better.
Productivity experts have used this kind of exercise for decades and it’s a pretty basic concept – you just track what you’re doing all day long for a set period of time. That tracking gives you data and from that data you can make smarter decisions about how to use your time in the future.
There are some tricky parts to it though – but we’ll get to that in a minute.
First, let’s talk about the benefits.
Benefits of a Time Audit
In my experience, tracking what you’re doing all day and how long you’re doing it for has a surprisingly profound impact.
Just the process of tracking actually changes your behavior. If you know you have to document your activities, you’re naturally going to make better decisions. There’s a universal truth that states – “that which is tracked tends to improve.”
Whether you’re tracking time or finances or calories, the same thing happens. You just become more aware of what you’re doing and that, in and of itself, is a really useful thing.
But the goal of a time audit is to track over a relatively substantial period of time, anywhere from a week or two, to a month or even longer – that way, you settle into the process and you capture a significant amount of data. That data can then be analyzed to identify patterns and potentially pinpoint hidden problem areas.
The first time I did this at work was back in the early 2000s, when I was working as an executive assistant (and we had to do the time audit by hand which was really tedious – thankfully we don’t have to do that anymore – but we’ll get to that in a minute).
That first experience really taught me so much about myself. I learned that I do my best thinking before 11 am in the morning. I’m most social in the early afternoon, right after lunch. And the only way I will get things done in the late afternoon is to have a very clear plan. Otherwise, if I don’t have a plan, I tend to waste time and fall into unproductive rabbit holes.
But a time audit gives you so much more than just self-understanding. When you track your work, you also gain an understanding of how long various tasks actually take to do. If you’re the kind of person who makes a to-do list with 100 things on it and you honestly believe you can do them all in a day and you’re constantly shocked that you can’t – you need to do this.
You may find that a project you thought would take all day only takes a few hours. Or something you thought would take a few minutes actually takes all day.
It can be eye opening to see how our expectations are sometimes so completely different from our reality. And once you understand that, you can then create much more realistic plans for how to use your time.
As I mentioned earlier, I’m starting my own time audit this week and this time around, I really want to see if how I’m spending my time aligns with my true priorities. So I’m mostly interested in looking at the overall data. I want to see what percentage of my time during an average week is spent on certain activities.
I have a feeling that I’m spending too much time on things that aren’t really moving me closer to my goals – things that are kind of inherently satisfying to check off the list, but not necessarily valuable. Or maybe they’re still valuable things, but they might not be THE MOST valuable. If I can see the reality, I think I’ll be more confident to make the hard decisions that might need to be made to get things more aligned moving forward.
I will say that, for many of my clients, this is one of the most useful parts of a time audit. If you can show your boss with real data how much time you’re spending on certain things and the things that are being sacrificed in exchange for that, it can really help support prioritization discussions.
I had one client who discovered that she was spending more than half her week dealing with last-minute emergency requests and because of that, some really important projects were getting stalled out. Having that data helped her advocate for changes so she could start making progress on other things.
And all of this just brushes the surface. There is so much to gain from this exercise that it makes the pain of doing it worth it.
So now, let’s talk about how we do it.
How to Do a Time Audit
As I said earlier – the idea of this is so simple. You’re just tracking what you do all day long. The trick is, you have to track as you go – otherwise, if you wait until the end of the day, you are (more likely than not) gonna misremember and it just won’t be accurate. But tracking as you go is really tough. We all have daily habits and tracking probably isn’t one of them. So it’s really hard to remember. You might start off the day with the best intentions to track every single little thing. But by noon, you’ve completely forgotten. Plus, if you’re a multi-tasker, it gets really complicated because you’re switching around from one thing to another and then back to the previous thing. It gets messy.
You can probably tell I’ve run into these issues myself in the past, especially when tracking on paper or even using an Excel spreadsheet which I’ve done for many years. But now, we have time tracking tech tools that make it whole lot easier. It’s not totally automated, which is a good thing because we DO want the improved awareness of doing it ourselves. But these tech tools definitely make the process a lot easier. This isn’t to say that you can’t do a time audit on paper or in Excel, but I personally will not be doing that. I want to make it as easy as possible to capture the data from my computer or from my phone. And I want to be able to analyze the data using AI once I’m done. So here’s an overview of what I’m doing.
I’m using the Early app, which used to be called Timeular, which is a recommendation from my dear friend Julie Perrine. There are lots of time tracking tools out there – I’ve tried a few others but this one is definitely my favorite so far.
I’ve downloaded it on my phone, on my work computer and my home computer. I’ve connected it to my calendar and I’ve given it permission to see what apps I’m working in.
I’ve set up two folders – one business and one personal. And I’ve defined the activities I want to track in each.
You’ll notice that I’ve been tracking sporadically for a while just to get the hang of this tool, and to figure out exactly how I want to set things up…And I think I’m almost there.
To track an activity you just hit start button and then hit the stop button when you’re done. I can add tags to make the data more specific, and I can manually adjust things if I forget to start or stop an activity.
Plus, since it can also see the apps I was in and the things on my calendar, I can double check myself and, if I ever forget to add an activity, I have evidence that tells me what I was doing, rather than relying on my memory.
In fact, if I wanted this process to be entirely hands off, I could just rely solely on the automatic tracking column. But I don’t want to do that…because I do want the benefit of consciously tracking and building my awareness throughout the day.
Also, inside the app, I have a section called insights that will give me some high-level analysis of my data.
I’m planning on tracking for at least two months starting in the fall, which is usually my busiest time of year. I think it’s smart to do an audit like this in each season, but space them out a bit so you’re not going it back to back. Though, I will say that several of my clients have (through this process) made tracking such a habit that they just continued to do it as a regular daily thing. I can see a lot of benefit to that so I am slightly angling in that direction. I’m not fully committed yet, but Early is so easy to use, I can see that as a real possibility.
For now, my plan is to do this for two months and then reflect on what I learned and make improvements from there. I will definitely make another video at that point, sharing some of what I learn.
If you’re interested in doing at time audit yourself, you can get my free downloadable Time Audit Reflection worksheet to help you organize your thoughts and analyze your data once you’re done. The link for that is in the description below.
I would love to know what you think… Have you ever done a time audit or are you thinking about doing one? If so, what tool are you going to use? Let me know your thoughts in the comments below.
Thanks for watching and I’ll see you next time.
