Time is one of the most, if not the most, important aspects of your life.
But far too many of us spend our time the wrong way.
A quote from the stoic philosopher Seneca comes to mind:
People are frugal in guarding their personal property; but as soon as it comes to squandering time they are most wasteful of the one thing in which it is right to be stingy.
Unlike money, which can be squandered and regained, time is a precious resource we can never get back.
The way you spend your time dictates the quality of your life.
You can use a “time audit” to build a better relationship with time, skyrocket your productivity, and focus on what matters—while letting go of everything else that doesn’t.
A time audit is a process that gives you a bird’s eye view of where you spend your time each day. After you use this process, you’ll discover that there are a bunch of tasks you can either:
When people say they’re too busy to work on goals that are important to them, it means they don’t fully understand how they’re using their time.
Once you go through this process and see a clear picture of how you spend your time, you’ll get the momentum you need to level up both your personal and professional life.
Here are just a few examples of benefits you can reap from a time audit:
Get the full picture of how you spend your time so you can reclaim more of it for habits, hobbies, and goals that matter.
For your time audit, you’re going to create a set period where you’re tracking everything you do.
You want to set some metrics like:
My recommendations:
For now, focus on getting the information down on paper or in a spreadsheet so you can analyze it later.
You’re going to want to track everything:
When I say everything, I mean track everything.
After you track all of your time for two weeks, you can label each increment using the following system.
According to a productivity and decision-making framework called the Eisenhower Matrix, there are four different types of tasks:
Let’s break down what each of these tasks means and how you should think of them moving forward.
If you’re broke, feel stuck, and aren’t living the life you want, you have zero business spending a bunch of time on activities that don’t move the needle. I’m not your moral authority. But if you want to get ahead, you’ll have to sacrifice some things that you enjoy but don’t necessarily add much value to your life.
Examples:
No one can be productive 24/7. And the above examples aren’t necessarily bad—especially when you’re doing them occasionally or in moderation. The time you enjoy isn’t wasted time. But when activities like these keep you from moving forward, then you have a problem.
Some tasks need to be done, but not this second—like errands. Schedule time to knock out a bunch of them all at once. Don’t run little errands every single day. Have a single day in your week when you get all your errands done. If something doesn’t need to be done that second, then don’t do it.
Examples:
You don’t have to do everything yourself. You’re just one person, which means you can’t do everything. Either find people to help you or say no to tasks that can be done by someone else.
As soon as you can afford it, hire out certain tasks you don’t need to do yourself. If you run a business, you can’t scale it unless you have employees or contractors to help carry the load.
Examples:
You avoid urgent and important tasks because they’re the hardest to accomplish. For example: If you’re trying to start a side business that can help you escape your 9-to-5 job, you should make time to work on it every single day.
When I wanted to build my writing career on top of my 9 to 5 job, I woke up at 5 a.m. and wrote for an hour or two every single day for years.
If something is truly important to you, you make time for it instead of trying to find time for it.
Examples:
To recap how the time audit works:
By the end of two weeks, you should have 336 hours of information. You’ll see exactly how much time you spend on each activity. The results might startle you when you realize how inefficient you’ve been with your time, but that’s what the audit is for—to show you there’s a better way of operating your life.
Record exactly how each of the 336 hours breaks down into each of the four buckets and measure up the totals. After that, it’s time to analyze your results.
Now that you see where you spend your time, you need to ask yourself some tough questions and make smart decisions moving forward.
Here are a couple of recommendations for how to analyze results.
These are the tasks you’ll focus on getting rid of altogether. Identify the time wasters and create a plan to avoid them in the future.
You’ll notice different trends by looking over your time audit.
You might notice that the way you spend your time is inefficient because you:
These are just a few examples, but the patterns will emerge when you analyze the results.
You’ll notice a bunch of different ways that your time use is affecting your life, which will help you create ways to improve your productivity.
These examples come to mind:
Ask yourself these important questions:
The end result of your time audit should lead to this outcome: Have a brutally honest conversation with yourself about how you spend your time so you can finally become more productive.
You can’t manage time. You can only manage your priorities. It’s up to you to rank the importance of tasks in your life. If you want to get better at prioritizing your tasks, you have to stop letting yourself off the hook.
We use many little phrases to let ourselves off the hook instead of taking responsibility for our time.
Saying you don’t have the time to do something isn’t true. If you choose to do certain tasks above others, own them.
You always have a choice.
You don’t have to do anything.
Re-framing your relationship with time starts by admitting that fact. You have to admit that you’re choosing to give importance to some tasks above others, and how you weigh that importance and make decisions will determine how your life turns out.
Check out these additional resources to hold yourself accountable and manage your time like a pro:
There is no in-between.
Lack of time is one of the fundamental lies that keeps you stuck in life.
The way you use your time shows the way you view yourself. It shows how important your own life is to you. It says whether or not you give a damn about making the most of your time on this earth.
The way you decide to use your time, in the long run, determines your fate.
Choose wisely.
