Time Management - How to do a Time Audit

Do you have a Time Management problem?

Busy, busy, busy. The picture in the header may look generic, but it's how many people feel about their calendar and their commitments. Some people even seem to be 'busy' all the time. When I was a manager, some in my team sometimes told me that they didn't ask me something because I seemed busy. To me, that was very worrying, because even though I had many commitments, some of those were definitely not more important than a question (or need, or concern) from my team. So apart from having an effect on oneself, this also has an effect on others.

Do you ever feel overwhelmed by your responsibilities? Do you feel, at the end of the day, that you haven’t achieved anything concrete or relevant? Do you sometimes wonder where all the hours have gone? Do you notice that most of your effort is on things that need to happen now, but you’re never looking ahead? Does life feel like a never ending series of sprints, without ever having time to rest, reflect, regroup? Have you ever put off that long term task again, because you were drowned in meetings, emails or other 'urgent' things?

If you tick off any of the questions above, you most likely have a time management challenge on your hands. Your time is, by definition, limited, but your allocation of it is suboptimal.?

In my earlier article I set about the basics of Time Management. Here you find the difference between Important and Urgent, and some pointers on how to interpret this. Before continuing to Time Management strategies, I thought it was helpful to show you step by step how to do a time audit.

How to do a time audit?

If you have the idea (possibly after reading these two articles) that you’re not spending your time the way you’d like to, a good way to zoom in on where your time is going is doing a time audit.?Because even though you might know or suspect that you have a problem, you might not know exactly where the cause is. And so you need to do some diagnosis.

A time audit is basically taking a week or a period of a couple of weeks and monitor where your time is going. The quick and dirty way is to just look at the most recent past week, looking at your calendar and fill in the blanks. On the other hand, the accuracy of this is very much dependent on how detailed your calendar is (do you, for instance, block time for activities in your calendar, or does it just consist of the meetings and calls you attend?). So the more accurate (but slightly more cumbersome) way is to actually keep track of what you’ve been doing for a week.?

You can use the template below in order to keep track of your time and categorize it. The idea is to count hours, not necessarily minutes. You’re looking for a ballpark figure, not a 100% perfect picture.?

Time Audit - step by step

You then use this step by step process to get your time overview:

(1) In the top section, compose your calendar to the best of your ability. Where has your time mostly gone per hour? Again, this doesn't need to be perfect, but should be a fair representation of reality. Do be honest with yourself here. If you've been wasting time on something you already know is less important or relevant, do note it down here. You're looking for reality and transparency, because that helps us improve ourselves. We're not perfect now and we're not going to be perfect either. But we shouldn't fool ourselves by covering up the truth - that doesn't lead to growth.

(2) Once you have completed the top section, list all the activities in the second section, in the left hand column. Note the time spent in the second column as well. You might need more fields than I have here. I've included some examples of activities that could be in someones weekly schedule. If you'd like to use this clean template to work on, let me know in the comments below this article, I can send it.

(3) Try grouping your activities so you get a better broader picture on what type of activities use up your time. Put this in the third column.

(4) Now, using the Eisenhower Matrix in the third section, try to decide what activities fit where (the number of the quadrant). Put this in the fourth column. You can now add up and get an estimate on how much time you've been spending in each quadrant, and which activities make up that amount of time and effort. Usually, most of your time will have gone to Quadrants nr. 3 and 4. This is quite normal. If this is not the case, you either have a special profession, an exceptional week, or you haven't really looked at your activities in a critical way. In the latter case, read my previous article on Important vs. Urgent.

Congratulations - you have now completed your Time Audit! Transparency in what you're doing is always a very important step to enable yourself to make improvements. If you're not clear (and honest) about what you're doing, that makes it difficult to make progress.

Once you've completed this picture, you can now ask yourself if you'd like to spend more time on activities that aren't listed (usually in Quadrant 2), and less time on activities in Quadrants 3 and 4. Which strategies to employ to achieve this, I will discuss in a next article.

If you have any questions, would like to have this Time Audit template to use yourself, or have any reflections after trying this out, do let me know in the comments or send me a message.