Do You Need to Be Audited?

Do you really know where your time is going? We often say we don’t have enough time to add exercise to our schedule, or we don’t have enough time to prepare a meal so we just stop and get fast food. But is that really the case? I mean, are we really strapped for time?

It’s funny how the same women who claim to be so bogged down are commenting on Facebook about what happened on their favorite reality show or giving play by play of the football game.

Below is a great exercise that can help you identify those time bandits.

How To Audit Your Time

One of the best ways to determine how you spend your time and how you think you spend your time is by doing a time audit.

Mark Shead from Productivity 501 (www.productivity501.com) offers a great system for conducting a time audit:

1. Get a timer and schedule it to go off in one hour. Start it at the beginning of your day at some odd hour like 8:11.
2. When the timer goes off, write down what you are doing at that moment then reset the alarm and go back to the activity. Repeat this throughout the day. You should collect time audit data from several different days during different weeks. Maybe Monday and Thursday on week 1, and Tuesday and Wednesday on week 2. You choose.

Once you have your data, it’s time to analyze it. Categorize what you were doing by how important the task was. Use three categories:

• Very important – key to accomplishing your goals
• Not particularly important – something that may need to be done, but doesn’t add significant value and should be minimized as much as possible
• Worthless – activities you shouldn’t be doing at all

Shead states that many people will find that they are spending a lot of time on activities that fall within the last two categories. Once you complete your time audit you can marvel at the fact that you are efficient beyond measure, or really begin to shift your activities to match the priorities in your life.

Hmmm. You might find that you really can carve out time for a little 15 minute workout.

I will be starting my time audit next week. As productive as I think I am, I’m sure there is room for improvement.

Let me know when you give this a try. I wold love to hear about your discoveries. Please share your comments below.