SeanFromCanada's Blog

I’m conducting an audit of how I spend my time at work. NeoStream is really rolling these days and there are many competent professionals in our organization. As the business has grown, my role has changed significantly. For example, among other roles, I used to be the HR Manager, Finance Manager and Communications person – we now have far more qualified people in each of these positions. It’s an interesting process to weed through not only how my day is consumed, but what it should be spent on.

The process is fairly simple. I’ve committed to logging my activities for the upcoming week – in 15 minute intervals. Beside each time entry, I’ll mark whether the activity is urgent, important, not urgent and/or not important (from a work perspective). I’ve also included a category for ‘personal’ items, so I have a place for picking up my daughter after work and other personal matters that I need to get done.

This activity originated from two key questions my business coach asked me the other day. They were:

1) What are the 2 or 3 key things that you need to specifically accomplish to take NeoStream to the next level?; and,
2) How well positioned are you to spend 80% of your time on those activities?

The answer to the second question was where I really struggled…In truth, I didn’t know the answer… though I suspected my schedule would allow for about 30% – 40% of time to be spent on my key activities. Thus, the time audit.

Obviously, if I’m serious about furthering my business (which I am), I’d like to not only focus the majority of my time on the things that will make the biggest difference, but I don’t want to be wasting my time…it’s simply too precious of a currency.

I can’t advocate for this process yet – I’ve never done one of these before, however if you’re interested, here is the format I’ll be using. I plan to set my iPhone to ring an alarm every 15 minutes (that I’m not in a meeting) so I can record my previous 15 minute’s activities.

I’ll let you know how it goes…when I have time.

Want to try out this method yourself?
Here is the template I will be using (feel free to download it and use it along with me).

Time Audit Template

Let me know what you think of this method/template in the comment box below!