2024 Time Audit
How I spent my time last year and what I am planning on doing differently this year.
Keeping track of your time is arguably just as important – if not more important – than tracking your finances. While there are ways you can make more money, once you spend your time you’ll never get it back.
A time audit is a useful tool that helps you figure out if you’re aligning your time with activities and goals that are important to you.
By understanding how you spent your time in the past you can come up with strategies to optimize and improve how you spend it in the future.
If you feel like you’re stuck on something or aren’t making the kind of progress you would like to be making, a time audit can help you identify ways you can allocate your time differently.
In a previous article, I walked you through a step-by-step process for how to audit your time:
This article will build off of that. Here, I’m going to audit and analyze my time utilization from 2024. I’ll highlight what worked and what didn’t, identifying some lessons I learned and how I’m going to allocate my time differently this year.
How I collected data on myself
I use Clockify religiously. It might sound excessive, but I clock in and out of every task I do. As we speak, I am currently clocked into writing this article:
There’s a lot of value in doing this. For one, it helps me see whether or not I’m using my time during the work day to actually get work done. If a standard workday is eight hours but I only clock four hours worth of work, that tells me I didn’t have a very productive day. If I do that consistently, it tells me there might be a bigger issue with the type of work I’m doing.
Logging your time also helps you see what you’re prioritizing. For example, one of my goals for this year is to diversify my income through more product development. This includes hosting workshops and creating digital products like ebooks.
So far this year only 2% of my time has gone toward product development. This tells me I’m not prioritizing projects that lead to the creation of new projects. Why is that? Is it because I don’t actually think this is a priority or is it because there’s something else at play?
In addition to logging my time on Clockify, I also block my time on Notion. This is a bit redundant but that’s on purpose. While Clockify automatically logs my time on a calendar, it’s not a calendar I use everyday. I find it’s more helpful to log blocks of time on Notion so I can visually see how I’m using my time for both work and non-work activities.
I also like how I can integrate all of my Notion databases onto my calendar. I can see blocks of time I’m allocating toward client work, my own editorial calendar, and my meal plan all in one place.
Here’s an example of what this looks like. Last week I had a few client assignments due. On Thursday I worked on client work during two blocks of time: 9:10-10:40 am and 1:30-2:15 pm. I keep track of all my assignments in a separate freelance writing kanban database. During the second block you can see I submitted the assignments I had due for that client (shown in yellow).
Doing this allows me to combine time blocking with task management. I can add different data points from different projects onto my calendar. Chores, client work, workouts, and meals are all visible in one place. Plus because I can put tasks on my calendar, it increases the likelihood they actually get done.
If you’re not in the habit of tracking your time now, make it a habit. Just like a budget, the only way you can make changes in how you track your time is if you first know where it is going. You’ll need to start collecting data on yourself before you proceed with an audit.
How I categorized my activities
Another important step in tracking your time and doing an audit is to create categories or buckets to assign your time to.
Last year I didn’t do a very good job of this. I had a lot of different categories based on the different work activities I was doing. This year, I’m organizing my time based on revenue streams. This includes:
Freelance writing
Publishing my own content Substack
Consulting
Conducting workshops and creating digital products
I also have categories for non-revenue-generating work. This includes:
Household management
Maintenance on my website, Substack, LinkedIn, etc.
Managing VAs when I assign tasks
Overhead
Tracking non-revenue-generating work is an important indicator that tells me how well I’m using my time. Even though my hourly rate for my paid work is pretty good, when I divide my monthly income by all of the time I spent working – including doing admin and checking emails – my rate falls off a cliff. And because I’m self-employed, when you factor in taxes, my take home rate is a fraction of what I actually charge.
This is one of the reasons why I ruthlessly cut the amount of time I spent on email last year. The more time I spent managing my inbox, the more it dropped my hourly rate. One of my goals for this year is to get to inbox zero so the only time I’m spending in my inbox is to field new work activities.
Using Clockify I can break my work down into categories based on client projects or specific tasks. For example, as a freelance writer, I usually outline an article before I begin writing it. I can log my time based on specific tasks I’m doing as part of my writing workflow.
This is useful to do because not all tasks within a project are paid. To be more productive – whether that’s increasing your bottom line or freeing up your time for different activities – you want to be mindful of task vampires.
Pitching ideas to new clients, for example, is a type of unpaid vampire work that falls into freelance writing. While it leads to new business, most pitches just go off into the ether. It’s important to be mindful of how much time I’m spending pitching ideas and who I’m pitching ideas to. That way I can spend less time trying to develop new business with editors who realistically have no interest in hiring me to begin with.
At the minimum, I would recommend tracking time spent on revenue and non-revenue-generating work. You can do this whether you’re self-employed like me, a business owner, or work a regular 9to5. The more you document and track your time, the more apparent categories will be. And the more apparent categories are, the easier it’ll be to start prioritizing work.
How I quantified where I spent my time
Once you have a system for recording your time and categorizing it, you’ll want to quantify how you spend your time.
The easiest way is to track hours spent doing a task. Clockify automatically does this while you’re clocked in working on a task.
You can also quantify your time according to how much you’re earning and the goals or projects you're allocating your time to.
As a freelance writer, I keep a detailed spreadsheet that tracks every article I complete for a client. I record how much the assignment paid and how much time it took to complete. This gives me an hourly rate for every assignment I complete. I can average these rates based on individual clients or in aggregate to set hourly targets I need to hit.
Last year was a rough year for freelance writers. A lot of publications cut their teams which led to job losses across the industry. Desperate for new work, I figured some work was better than no work. I signed on with a client that paid substantially less than all of my other clients.
By using time to quantify my labor rate, I could compare the new work with my existing work. The rate was abysmal. When I compared these assignments with other articles that took a comparable amount of time to complete, I was making a fraction of what I normally do.
Quantifying my time and assigning a value to it signaled to me that I needed to stop working for this client ASAP. While some work may be better than no work, not all work is good work. Writing junk SEO articles for $70 just wasn’t a good use of my time.
When you do a time audit, here are a few other metrics you should look at:
Total hours worked per week & year
Breakdown of income-generating vs. non-income-generating activities
How much time do you spend on each major category?
Average time per task (e.g., time per article, per client pitch, per marketing effort)?
Hours spent on personal projects or goals
Time leaks: Where did time disappear without meaningful output?
As a baseline, track how many hours you’re actually working per week – not the amount of time you’re obliged to sit at your desk staring at your computer screen – and a performance metric associated with your work. If you work for yourself, that could be the amount of client work you completed. If you work for a company, track how much business your activities have directly or indirectly generated.
For example, if you do a lot of marketing work, track the time you spend building and implementing marketing campaigns and compare it to return on ad spend. If you’re spending most of your time on LinkedIn but most of your return on ad spend is coming from Instagram, that’s an easy indicator you can produce more value for your company by reallocating your time away from LinkedIn and toward Instagram.
Analyzing my data from 2024
Last year I clocked 1,266 hours. This is active time I was clocked in engaged with my work. Most of this work was revenue generating but some of it wasn’t.
Clockify has dashboards that makes it easy to evaluate your data but it also creates reports that you can download and feed into ChatGPT. This is why I think logging your time is important. ChatGPT is a really good tool to help you figure out how to allocate your time differently.
In 2024, 72% of my income came from freelance writing projects. After that, I earned around 17% from publishing my own content on Medium and Substack. About 11% of my income came from consulting work and a tiny percentage came from digital products.
Compare this to my time allocation for the year. I spent the bulk of my time writing my own content even though it didn’t pay as much as freelance writing.
For me, freelance work is a means to an end not an end in and of itself. My goal is to use freelance writing to meet my financial needs until my own content library is big enough to support me. It’s a necessary trade-off, but ideally I’d like to get to a place where I spent the majority of my time creating my own content.
Within each work category, some work didn’t provide as much value as I would have liked. For example, last year I took on several consulting gigs. Some of these were commission-based projects while others were flat-fee projects.
About 83% of my time was spent on client work while the remaining 17% of my time was spent on overhead activities related to developing new business. That’s not bad, however, only 52% of my client work was paid work. That meant a lot of the time I spent doing consulting work last year was actually unpaid.
Going through this process helps me see the difference between real versus presumed work. Freelance writing and writing my own content are activities that produce something. While the compensation varies, the output of my work is articles and essays that constitute intellectual property. I own my own content and can repurpose any way I like in the future. This is what I would consider real work.
Everything else I did was presumed work. Attending meetings, responding to emails, and developing products without a strategy in mind was work, but it wasn’t necessarily good work. It kept me busy and in some cases generated revenue but it didn’t help me move the needle on projects I’ve been working toward.
Understanding the difference between the two can help you figure out work to eliminate, delegate, or automate. Once you do that, you can make adjustments to change how you allocate your time in the future.
Changes I’m making in 2025
Based on my time audit, I decided to make several changes for this year.
I stopped taking consulting work. I realized I didn’t quite have a solid offer nor did I have the confidence to charge the rates I needed to charge to make consulting a worthwhile venture. Because a good portion of my client work was talking about getting work done – rather than actually doing work – it left me feeling empty. I want to do good work but I realized I need to partner with individuals and companies whose values align with my own.
I’m saying ‘no’ to meetings. While I didn’t spend a lot of time taking meetings in 2024, I spent enough to know I don’t want to take anymore this year. I gave away time to people last year who pretended to want to work with me in order to “pick my brain.” While I recognize it’s important to give to others, there are also boundaries. I said ‘yes’ to meetings and activities I shouldn’t have so this year I will be more discerning about how I give my time.
I’m prioritizing higher value freelance work. It’s clear that freelance writing is anchoring my income at the moment. In order to spend more time writing content like this I need to find higher value clients. Most of the freelance writing work I do is SEO content for other content creators. In 2025, I’m allocating more time to business development activities so I can sign new clients who will help me get a better return for my time.
I’m allocating more breaks throughout the day. This is really difficult to do but I think it’s essential. I get so caught up working that I don’t prioritize other goals. I have a bookshelf of unread books that I would like to finish this year. I’m usually too tired at the end of the night to read so I know if I want to achieve this goal, I need to make it a priority to schedule reading time during the workday.
A time audit is a good exercise to do quarterly or annual. It can tune you into your personal workflow, the times during the day you’re most productive, and the work activities that are actually contributing to your bottom line.
By making minor adjustments, you can make sure you’re getting the most out of your work time while establishing boundaries that protect the time you want to spend on more meaningful pursuits – like raising a family or personal creative projects.
I’d love to hear from you.
Have you done a time audit? Was it helpful? If you haven’t, what’s holding you back from doing one?
Leave a comment below. I’d love to hear what your experience has been like.
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