Bite-Sized Training™

Time Management Audit

Time Management Audit
Bite-Sized Training

This e-book is published by Mind Tools Ltd.

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Version 2.0.

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“Mind Tools” is a registered trademark (US 4,566,696, EU

012473377) of Mind Tools Ltd.

Cover image © iStockphoto/ermingut.

Contents

1. Introduction 1

2. Where Does Your Time Go? (Part 1) 2

3. Where Does Your Time Go? (Part 2) 6

4. Is Your Time Well Spent? 7

5. Auditing Your Inbox 11

6. Key Learning Points 14

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1.  Introduction

Y
ou come into the office on Monday morning, sit down at your desk,
and organize your To-Do List with all the tasks you want to complete
during the day. As you start working, you feel confident that you can
do everything.
However, by the end of the day, you’ve only completed a few of your tasks, and
you’re not sure where the time has gone.
Unless you’re a practiced time manager, you may not be fully aware of how you
spend your time. You’ll likely have a general idea, but you may be shocked by
the truth!
It’s important to keep track of time, because it’s often the resource we have in
shortest supply. Taking stock of your time enables you to decide where best to
allocate the precious hours you have.
Think of your time like a product on a warehouse shelf. When your customers
demand it, you dole it out on a first-come-first-served basis. This means that the
shelf will soon be empty, and the people who got there first are not necessarily the
most deserving of this precious resource.
Just as a business monitors its stock levels, you need to keep track of your time.
How much do you have available? How much should you dedicate to certain
activities? Do you have some available to deal with unexpected demands? You can
answer these types of questions by carrying out a time management audit.
In this Bite-Sized Training™ session, we’ll explore how you can do this. Since you
can’t increase the number of hours in your day, you need to be diligent about
tracking and optimizing the time you have.
In this session, you will:
• Complete an Activity Log, so that you can track exactly what you do.
• Analyze the types of activities that take up most of your time.
• Build a system to manage your inbox effectively, using delegation and
prioritization techniques.

Note:
We present this Bite-Sized Training session in a slightly different format from
our usual ones. Instead of completing it in an hour, we ask you to spend a week
tracking and recording your time, and then return to finish the workbook.

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2.  Where Does Your Time Go? (Part 1)

B
efore you can allocate your time effectively, you need to know how you
spend it. And you may be surprised by what you discover if you haven’t
tracked your hours before. Do you really know:
• How much of your day you spend on productive work?
• What percentage of your time you dedicate to your responsibilities?
• How many minutes (or hours) you dedicate to managing and
recovering from interruptions?
To answer these questions, you need to estimate how long certain activities take,
and then compare this figure with how much time you actually spend on them.

Action:
List the main activities that make up your working day on the next page. Start
with the first tasks you need to complete in the morning, and try to group similar
jobs together. Include an “other” or “miscellaneous” activity for the things that
aren’t easily definable.

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 Activity Estimated Time Spent (%) Actual Time Spent (%)

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 Action:
Next, think about a typical working week, and add any activities that you haven’t
already included to the table on the previous page. When you are satisfied that
your list covers your main tasks, complete the estimated time column.

To calculate the actual time you spend on these activities, you need to
complete an Activity Log. This is an accurate record of everything you do over a
certain period.
To record your time in an Activity Log, simply write down when you start a task,
describe what you are doing, and then note how long you worked on it. You need
to record the time, description and duration every time you change activities.
Here’s an example of a morning at the office:

Value
Time Activity Duration
(High/Medium/Low)

8:00 am Check emails. 15 min Med

8:15 am Team meeting. 10 min High

Chat to colleague in the

8:25 am 15 min Low
hall after the meeting.
Check phone messages,
8:40 am 15 min Low
return calls.

8:55 am Get coffee. 10 min High

9:05 am Software project. 20 min Med

Consultation: colleague
comes to door to discuss
9:25 am the presentation we are 40 min Low
making to the Board
next week.

10:05 am Take break in staff room. 15 min Low

10:20 am Check new emails. 10 min High

Reorganize software
10:30 am project materials and get 30 min Med
back to work.

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 Provide staff member
11:00 am with directions/ideas for 10 min High
the work they are doing.
Software project – try to
11:10 am 10 min Med
get back to work.
Phone call with
11:20 am boss about the 10 min High
software project.
Refocus on the software
11:30 am 40 min Med
project work.

12:10 pm Lunch. 65 min

Total Time:
315 minutes

When you complete an Activity Log, it’s important to fill in the “value” column.
Here, you gauge how important a task is to your organization and to achieving
your goals. Ultimately, you should aim to spend the majority of your time on
high-value tasks and minimize low-value activities as much as sensibly possible.
In our example, only 35 percent of the person’s morning (110 of the 315 minutes
accounted for) was spent on high-value tasks.

Action:
Use the Activity Log template on page 15 to record your tasks over the next
week. Try to use the same activity categories that you used on page 3 (this will
make it easier to compare your estimated and actual times).
Make a note in your diary to resume this training session in a week’s time.

Tip:
See our article for more on Activity Logs.

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3.  Where Does Your Time Go? (Part 2)

N
ow that you’ve completed your Activity Log, are you surprised by where
your time goes?
It’s amazing to learn what we really do over the course of a day. This
powerful exercise is often the turning point for people who struggle with
time management. Knowing how long you spend on tasks enables you to start
taking control with solid planning.
How well do you think you estimated your time usage? Let’s find out.

Action:
Gather up your Activity Log sheets for the week. Calculate the total amount of
time you accounted for, and record the percentage you spent on each activity in
the “actual time spent” column on page 3. Then, answer the questions below.

What have you learned about the way you spend your time? Were your estimates accurate? If not,
why do you think this is? What surprised you the most?

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4.  Is Your Time Well Spent?

S
o far, you’ve identified what you’re really spending your time on, and you’ve
categorized your tasks to show whether they are high, medium or low
value. Next, we’ll identify where your real priorities lie. This will help you
determine which actions you should keep doing, which you should do
more of, and which you should stop doing.
The purpose of a time management audit is to allocate your available hours more
effectively. To do this, you need to identify which activities are high priority and
which are not, and this is where the Action Priority Matrix is useful.
You can use this tool (see Figure 1, below) to put each of your tasks into one of four
categories, based on its impact and how much effort it requires.

Figure 1:  Action Priority Matrix

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The four quadrants are:
• Quick Wins – these are tasks that return high value for the time and effort
you put in. The more “quick wins” you can accomplish, the better.
• Major Projects – these are high impact, high effort, time consuming
projects. It’s easy to let these monopolize your schedule, so you need to
make sure that you’re using your time efficiently.
• Fill Ins – these are the low impact, low effort tasks that you should
complete in any time that’s spare. If you don’t have any capacity, these just
don’t have to get done!
• Thankless Tasks – these are the activities that give meaning to the phrase
“work smarter, not harder.” If you are spending lots of time and effort on
something that will give you a low return, there is no reason to continue.
Either drop the task, allocate it to someone who can do it quicker (a
specialist), or delegate it to a more junior team member.

Action:
Determine the position of each of the activities that you identified on page 3 on
the Action Priority Matrix, and record them on the next page. In the “present”
column, include an approximate percentage of time you spend on each.

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 Quick Wins Major Projects

Activity Present Proposed Activity Present Proposed

Fill Ins Thankless Tasks

Activity Present Proposed Activity Present Proposed

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 Action:
Take a moment to think about how efficiently you are currently allocating
your time. Are there “thankless tasks” that you can delegate or drop? Are you
spending too much time on “fill ins”?
In the “proposed” column for each activity, indicate whether you will:
• Drop the item.
• Delegate it.
• Decrease the time spent – give a new time percentage.
• Increase the time spent – give a new time percentage.

This is the start of your new time-management plan. You’ll find it much easier to
organize your day now that you have a big-picture idea of how to allocate the
hours you have available.

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5.  Auditing Your Inbox

F
or many of us, dealing with email and other communications takes up
a large part of our day. Therefore, no time management audit would
be complete without examining how best to handle this necessary but
time-consuming task.
Some people check their emails every few minutes, excited by what might
arrive. Others ignore their inboxes, hoping that the contents will disappear by
themselves. Although it’s important to keep on top of your emails, you risk wasting
time and lowering your productivity if you check them too often.
How do you currently manage your inbox? Do you deal with messages in
chronological or reverse order? By how much you like the sender? By how
interesting the subject line sounds? By focusing on jokes, YouTube® clips,
Buzzfeed® quizzes, or humorous memes first? Or maybe last?
Your goal is to handle emails in order of priority. When you have a system for
prioritizing and dealing with messages, you will do it much more quickly, and you
will be much more effective.

Action:
Think about how you currently manage your inbox. How efficient are you?
Give yourself a rating from 1 to 10 (1 = inefficient, 10 = very efficient).

First, you should aim to schedule one or two blocks of time to deal with email
throughout the day. For example, first thing in the morning and right after lunch.

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 Action:
Look over your time management audit on page 15, and decide how long to
allocate to email management each day. Record this below.

Total time allocated to email management:

Number of sessions I will divide this into:

Session time:

Session time:

Session time:

Session time:

When you have a number of emails in your inbox, work through them in the
order that you received them. This addresses the time-sensitive nature of some
messages, and it ensures that you don’t miss one by mistake. Check for any
follow-up messages that you need to read before you reply (some email clients,
such as GMail®, will automatically stack your messages into “threads” for you).

The 4 Ds!
You now know when you will deal with email, so the next step is to decide how.
The “4 D” system is extremely effective for managing your inbox. For each message
that comes in, you have four options:
• Do it – for simple requests and responses, just do it! It’s easier to hit “reply” and
respond quickly than it is to set the email aside for prioritization. “Do it” also
applies to items that you don’t need to act on but want to file for reference.
• Delete it – after you’ve skimmed an email and decided it’s not actionable,
and you don’t need to keep it, delete it or archive it. If you’re worried about
permanently removing messages, set up a folder for “To Delete” items.
You then take them out of your inbox, and you can deal with your “delete
anxiety” later.
• Delegate it – does someone else need to act on this information? Is it
something you don’t need to deal with personally? Try to delegate as
much as you sensibly can.
• Decide its priority – the emails that are left are the ones you need to act
on. But first, you need to prioritize them. An email isn’t the most important
one just because you read it first or it came from your boss.

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 Action:
In the table below, record the last five emails that you received, and note down
your action for each (Do, Delete, Delegate, Decide).

Email Action Priority

Assign a priority order for the items that are either “delegate” or “decide.”

Tip:
For more on prioritization techniques, see our article and Bite-Sized
Training session.

Action:
Now that you have an effective strategy for managing your inbox, how
efficient do you think you’ll be? More than before?
Give yourself a rating from 1 to 10 (1 = inefficient, 10 = very efficient).

This is a really simple way to tame your inbox. By cutting out the “noise” of
unimportant emails that demand your attention, you will find that you can
manage your messages effectively, and schedule email into your day like any other
routine task.

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6.  Key Learning Points

Y
ou have little hope of taking control of your time until you know where
it goes. Completing an Activity Log enables you to identify which tasks
take the most time, and helps you pinpoint both the unimportant and the
high-value activities that fill your day.
Using the Action Priority Matrix gives you a very clear view of which activities
you should be doing, and which you should delegate or drop. When you look at a
task’s impact and the effort it takes to complete, you might be surprised by what is
actually an effective use of your time.
Finally, taking control of email is a huge step towards effective time management.
With some decisive action and solid prioritizing, you can get your inbox under
control and get on with the things that really need your attention.

Trademark Information
“YouTube” and “GMail” are trademarks of Google, Inc. (see www.youtube.com)
and mail.google.com), and “Buzzfeed” is a trademark of Buzzfeed, Inc. (see
www.buzzfeed.com).

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Activity Log
Print off as many copies of this as you need for your personal use.

Value
Time Activity Duration
(High/Medium/Low)

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