How to Track Your Time

How to Track Your Time

Now that we have a basic understand of what our TIME TARGET is, it’s time to take a closer look at where you are spending your time.

What’s the Best Way to Track my Time?

That starts with a time Audit.

Where are you spending your time?

If you already diligently track your time, then you can simply look back at the past couple of weeks… but most people do not do that!

If you truly want to get a handle on your time, you need to be thorough and honest about where you are spending it.

So if you are an Excel person, simply make a spreadsheet with half hour increments and set a timer on your phone for 30 minutes.

When the timer goes off record where you were spending your time.

If you want to utilize technology for this, there are some great free time tracking apps out there as well (I like “Toggl”, but if you just type in “Time Tracking” in the app store, several will come up).

We recommend that you do this for 2 weeks to get an accurate accounting.

As previously mentioned in our last post… yes, this is going to be tedious and challenging. It will be out of your comfort zone. It will be a new habit. AND it will be worth it!

How do I Analyze Where I’m Spending my Time?

So you have all of this information, how do you organize it?

Create buckets, and place your activity into these different buckets, which would include things like:

-  Customer & Client Work

-  Team Meetings

-  Emails

-  Strategy

-  Marketing & Business Development

-  Distraction

This should give you an accurate accounting of where you are spending your time.

Now where on your time target do each of these bucket fall?

What percentage of your time are you allocating to each?

If you are way off from your time target, it’s time to put a plan together to manage your time more effectively so you are making sure are carving out time to work ON your business.

We will discuss how to plan your time in future posts.

Let's get busy!