Where Does Your Time Go?

If you want to get more done, you need to start tracking your time!

Hello and welcome to Business Know-Hacks, where we talk about how to grow your company, avoid burnout and create a fantastic culture that attracts top talent.

Today, we'll talk about the topic of time and particularly a time study: how to understand where you're starting from. Any area of our lives that we want to improve, we need to understand the starting point, and that's what a time study does.

When you're improving the way that you spend your time in your company, you want to make sure that you're prioritizing the right activities and dedicating time to those things that actually move the needle and generate results.

For a time study, you need to start keeping a record of where your time is going. You need to measure that and for that you can use different ways. The intention is to understand throughout the day where are you spending your time? You can do this in 15 minute increments. You can use paper, you can use an excel spreadsheet or you can even use an app that is tracking. But the objective is that every 15, 30 minutes you're keeping track of what you're doing.

Sometimes you'll be in meetings. Other times you will be delivering service to clients. Other times it could be that you're going out for lunch or taking a break. You want to keep track of every single activity and start categorizing them. Now you do this for a period of time, let's say a week. Now you have an idea.

Hey! For that week I'm avoiding any outliers and now I know where my time is going. You can start classifying your value-added activities, what are incidentals that you anyway need to do and then what are wasteful activities, distractions, things that you want to start avoiding.

Some of the insights you may get are that there may be repetitive tasks that you can delegate or automate. Maybe your time is too fragmented and there's not enough time to focus on critical thinking or distractions are taking a lot of your time instead of priorities.

Once you have those those insights, you can start thinking how to improve the way that you spend the time in your company so that you can get the best results.

So start doing a time study today to understand what are some of the areas that you can improve and then start taking actions to make that better over time. Thanks again for joining us in Business Know-hacks. We'll see you in the next one!

If you want to improve how you use your time, create a time log with our template, reach out today!