If you’ve been around for a while, you know that I love the ability to make data-based decisions.
While most business owners are on board with tracking their revenue, their expenses, and their profit, there are far fewer that are willing to go all in and optimize their most important resource with time tracking.
I’m not going to lie to you and tell you that time tracking is incredibly fun. But I have yet to find another tool that can have such an incredible impact on your productivity, your effectiveness, and give such a boost to your decision-making abilities.
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Why Time Tracking is Important
One of the things that I’ve discovered about myself is that I’m absolutely terrible at estimating how long a particular task will take to complete.
If I’m looking back on something I did in the past, my guess on how long it took to finish that task is usually based on my feelings around it.
If it was something I love to do, I’ll likely look back and underestimate. And if it was something that wasn’t really my favourite, I tend to think it took way longer than it actually did.
As it turns out, I’m not the only one with this issue.
Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky coined a term for this, called the Planning Fallacy. It is a phenomenon in which predictions about how much time will be needed to complete a future task displays an optimism bias and we underestimate the time needed.
So we often think that we’re going to be way more productive than we are – and then when we don’t live up to those standards, we’re left frustrated and with our momentum limping along.
So what’s the best way to combat this?
We can do regular time tracking exercises, so we can see where our time is really going.
But before we dive into how to track our time well, let’s talk about some of the benefits.
Benefits of Tracking Your Time
1. Time tracking takes you from a false, overly optimistic view into reality by collecting and analyzing solid data.
It’s really important to remember here that time tracking requires honesty and consistency. Future decisions can only be as good as your data is!
One thing I always underline with my clients is that there’s nothing about time tracking that’s meant to make you feel bad, or guilty. It’s simply just a snapshot in time so you know where your baseline is.
2. Time tracking enables you to lean into your strengths
I like to rate effectiveness as we go through the time tracking exercise. This makes it clear to me which parts of my day are most productive for me.
In the same way that it’s hard to remember what we did a couple of days ago, it’s also difficult to remember how I was feeling last Monday at one o’clock.
When you have data to be able to build off of, it allows you to make decisions about how to structure your days and weeks to make best use of your productivity and your energy.
3. Accurate time tracking ensures that you’re maintaining your business’ profitability
What happens if you don’t know if completing a task is going to take one hour, or three hours? First, it makes it extremely difficult to offer an accurate financial quote for the job. It also is challenging know when the task can reasonably be delivered – and what your capacity is for new clients.
How to Complete a Time Audit
There’s not really one right way, but my preference is that for at least three, but preferably five normal working days, record all of the tasks that you do and how long they take.
I know, you’re thinking – what’s a normal working day?
As an entrepreneur, I know that no two days are the same. You’ll want to avoid time tracking on days that are way out of your norm, such as if you’re attending a conference, etc. You’ll want to stop every 15 minutes and make a note of exactly what you’re doing.
It’s really important here to be specific. So instead of noting something like “Client Work”’, instead write: “Draft email sequence for client X”.
Since time can really start to fly by when you’re in deep work mode, I really like to set my alarm every 15 minutes. This reminds me to check in and record what I’m doing.
“If I start to notice that time tracking is influencing my behaviour, should I go with it or should I stick with what I normally do?”
This is such a good question!
I am of the opinion that the hardest part of establishing a new habit is the beginning.
If time tracking gives you a three or five day head start to modifying a negative behaviour or adding a positive one, then go for it!
Just be sure to record it accurately.
A Resource to Help You Time Track
To get a downloadable time tracker you can use if you’d like to undertake a time audit, please sign up here:
You’ll want to print out one sheet for every day and to actually carry it around with you on a clipboard. This will allow you to make notes at regular intervals. If you go an hour or two without taking notes, your data will become less and less reliable.
And since you’re going to base decisions on it, you want the data to be as accurate as it possibly can be!
The worksheet is divided into 15 minute increments, and also includes a column where you can rate your effectiveness over that same time period. Choose ‘A’, high, ‘B’, medium, or ‘C’, low, in terms of effectiveness. You can leave the last column empty until you’re completely done with the exercise.
The last step is to collect all of your completed sheets and review them.
You’ll see the last column gives you the choice of four options: ‘K’, keep, ‘O’, outsource, ‘A’, automate, and ‘S’, scrap.
- The tasks that only you can be doing in your business should obviously stay in the ‘keep’ pile.
- Any items that a team member could take over for you could be marked as outsource.
- If there’s some task that could be automated with a software tool, mark those as ‘automate’.
- When you find yourself doing tasks that really don’t need to be done at all, they land in the scrap pile.
For the “outsource” tasks, look to see if something can be handed off immediately to a current team member. To do this, you might need to create an SOP for that first! If your current team lacks the skills or capacity, you can add it to a list of tasks that your next hire can take over.
Remember, you’ve already established how long the different tasks will take to complete, and that’s essential when delegating or hiring.
While time tracking can feel tedious. circling back to it once a quarter is a great place to start.
Hopefully each time you do it, you’ll have less and less things on your plate that shouldn’t be there. Each time you complete a time audit, you can quickly refocus on what’s really important and what only you should be doing.
So again, please grab the printable time tracker and dive right in!
And let me know in the comments if you’ve ever done a time audit. I’d love to hear how it went, and what your biggest takeaway was!
