How to Perform a Time Audit
A time audit is a tool that can help you become more aware of how you spend your time.
39,998,160 minutes.1
That’s about how much time you’ll have to live your life.
Time is your most valuable resource. That’s because it’s scarce.
Every minute you spend is a minute you’ll never get back.
That’s why being intentional with how you spend your time is so important.
The average person floats through life without any awareness of how they spend their time. By being intentional with your time, you can make sure you’re spending it on the right things.
A time audit is a tool for bringing awareness to your time utilization. It can help you increase your productivity while also ensuring your time is aligned with the things you value the most.
A time audit is a process of tracking and analyzing how you spend your time. Think of it like a budget but for time.
When most people think about budgeting, they think about it in the context of money. You take your expenses, deduct those expenses from your income, and hope there’s enough left over at the end of the month to set aside for a rainy day.
No one really thinks about their time in terms of a budget. But as Benjamin Franklin once said, time is money. Really, time and money are one and the same.
The truth is you need to approach your time like the finite resource that it is. There simply aren’t enough hours in the day and it’s easy for time to slip away from you if you don’t know how you’re spending it.
An audit is a process companies use to evaluate accuracy of data or compliance with rules and regulations. Companies perform regular audits to make sure there’s no funny business happening in their accounting department. The government is supposed to perform regular audits of departments and agencies too, in order to look for instances of fraud, waste, and abuse (but that doesn’t happen as frequently as it should).
Audits aren’t just for large organizations. Individuals can use them to evaluate whether or not they’re doing something efficiently. In the case of time, an audit can be conducted to review how you’re using your time, where you can allocate it, and how your time aligns with other important indicators like productivity.
Below is a step-by-step process you can follow to audit your time. If you’re struggling to get all of your work done or looking for free time to invest in a side hustle or hobby, an audit will give you a better sense of where your time is actually going and how you might be able to relocate it.
Step #1: Why are you doing a time audit?
Before you start tracking your time, identify the reason you’re conducting an audit in the first place. This will help you become aware of your habits during the time-logging process and guide you as you look for ways to optimize your time.
For many people, your goal might be to increase your productivity. As a writer, my productivity is measured by the number of revenue-generating articles I publish each month. I track my time religiously and know it takes me around three hours to publish an article like this, start to finish.
By doing a time audit, I discovered every time I logged onto LinkedIn, I spent around 20 minutes on the platform. If I log on twice a day, five days a week, that’s 200 minutes a week – or 3.33 hours – of time spent on LinkedIn.
Now, I like LinkedIn and I think it has long-term value. But the reality is, while my posts on Linkedin can lead to revenue-generating work, most of the time they don’t. By doing a time audit, I identified one activity I can reduce – using LinkedIn – to free up more time to write new articles.
Aside from measuring productivity, you can also use a time audit to look for:
Energy flow throughout the day
Habits and stress
Allocation toward specific projects
Alignment with personal values or goals
Before you begin collecting data on yourself, come up with an initial thing you want to focus on. This will help you design your time audit around one thing and will help you optimize your time for that.
Step #2: Set up the parameters of your time audit.
Once you know what you want to focus on, design your time audit. Figure out how you want to track your time. Some things you’ll want to consider:
Length of time you want to track
How you will track your time
What you will track
Tools you’ll use
Specific activities you’ll log
You can design your time audit any way you want. If you just want to track how you spend your time, then keep it simple and only track that. But if you want to track certain habits or how your mood fluctuates throughout the day, keep tabs on those things in your time log. You might be surprised by the patterns that begin to appear when you evaluate yourself.
When I did a time audit, I tracked everything from the moment I woke up until I went to bed. I methodically wrote down everything I did, minute by minute. If I spent two hours writing an article I wrote that down. But if I went to the bathroom and it took three minutes during that writing block, I wrote that down too.
In addition to time, I also tracked my mood and work location. I noticed when I did tasks I didn’t particularly enjoy I found myself looking for excuses not to work. I’d get up and walk around, take extra bathroom breaks, or go get coffee.
Not only did low-energy tasks take longer to complete, I often found myself spending money to move to a new work location in order to alleviate the pain of doing the task. I was not only inefficient but I literally paid a price to complete the work.
The more data you collect on yourself, the more you’ll be able to spot patterns like this. These patterns can help you identify your habits and allow you to redesign your work schedule around high-energy work in a more productive environment.
Step #3: Track your time.
After you’ve set up all the parameters of your audit, now comes the hard part – collecting data on yourself.
There are a number of ways you can do this:
Write everything down with pen and paper
Jot notes down in the notes app on your phone
Track your time with a spreadsheet
Use time-tracking software (I personally use Clockify)
The first time audit I ever did I wrote everything down with pen and paper. I carried a piece of scrap paper with me all day and jotted down my every move. I found maintaining a physical log held me accountable and any friction that would make it harder to collect data on myself.
Nowadays, I use both Clockify and spreadsheets. I like Clockify because you can set billable hours and connect it with your calendar. I can visually see how my work activities align with other activities throughout the day.
I can also see how many hours a day I’m actually spending doing actual work. You might not realize it, but checking your phone and scrolling through social media apps is a real time suck. That, combined with email, probably costs you hours every day.
Using digital tools to track your time allows you to see how your time relates to your income and helps you implement productivity strategies, like time blocking.
I also use spreadsheets to track the amount of time I spend on articles I write. This is how I track all of the articles I publish on Medium:
I log each article one by one and average them together. Because I know how long each article takes to write and the income I can expect to generate from each article, I can actually block out my time to get things done.
If this is your first time doing a time audit, you don’t need to be as thorough as I am. Keep it as simple as possible. Track everything by hand using pen and paper or on the notes app in your phone.
If you work for yourself or want to improve your performance at work, I would, however, recommend a time tracking habit.
Use time-tracking software like Clockify to clock in to every task you perform. Regularly evaluate how your time utilization tracks with your compensation. You might find you spend more time on non-revenue-generating work like responding to emails than you ought to.
Time tracking is the easiest way to bring attention to things and make changes where you need to.
Step #4: Evaluate your time log.
Now that you’ve taken the time to track your time, you have some data that you can evaluate.
The first thing you’ll want to do is look for patterns. The first one to look for is focus vs. fracturing. Do you have long blocks of undisturbed time where you’re getting work done? Or, do you find yourself shifting your focus every 10-15 minutes?
I mentioned earlier that whenever I have low-energy tasks, I break up that work by grabbing coffee or taking a walk. I do this subconsciously. Look for times when this happens in your schedule. You might not be aware that you’re breaking up low-energy tasks, decreasing your productivity as a result.
In addition to distractions, you want to look for areas when you’re in a flow state. This might be one or two hour chunks of time where you’re so focused on what you’re doing it’s as if time flows right past you.
You want to maximize flow activities in your day. For me, writing is a flow activity. I have the most energy in the mornings, so I prioritize writing projects before anything else. I don’t take meetings before noon and I usually do low-energy administrative tasks toward the end of the day.
As you evaluate your time log, look for how much of your work is aligned with your values. One of my core values is freedom. When I performed my time audit I was freelancing for a client that had a set work schedule. I had to be on Slack during certain blocks of time to respond to my client’s needs.
Being tethered to Slack for defined periods of time is the antithesis of freedom. It’s no wonder that those blocks of time coincided when I felt most distracted. I constantly needed to get up and walk or take coffee breaks because the work I was doing was extremely draining. Doing a time audit gave me the clarity I needed and eventually I stopped working with that client.
Analyze your data and look for patterns and indicators that show how you’re using your time. Take note of whether or not your time utilization aligns with your goals and values. If you constantly feel unproductive, it might not be you; it might just be that the work you’re doing isn’t a good fit.
Step #5: Apply changes to how you manage your time.
The last – and most important – part of a time audit is implementing changes into your life. Once you’re aware of low-value work that’s eating away at your time and the high-value work you’re not committing enough time to, you can make changes to make better use of your time.
Some of the changes you can make include:
Automating tasks
Outsourcing tasks to a virtual assistant
Designing a more flexible schedule
Implementing time blocking to capitalize on your energy flow
Schedule breaks throughout the day
Firing clients that don’t align with your workflow
Finding a new job
The changes you make will take time. It’s taken me years to get to a point where I can schedule blocks of time on my calendar a week in advance. It took even longer before I felt confident enough to restrict my time to accept meetings for the afternoon.
The goal of a time audit isn’t to completely overhaul your workflow. It’s to give you the awareness you need to make incremental changes to improve your time utilization over time.
Repeat this process periodically as often as you need to. Seasons of life change and you may need to reevaluate what’s important to you and how your time matches up.
How to get started with a time audit.
Now that you know how to do a time audit, the most important thing is actually doing it.
I recommend setting aside a week where you can commit to tracking your time. At a minimum track three days during your workweek but ideally aim for 5-7 days.
Schedule a meeting with yourself on your calendar the week after your time audit to go over the results. Some things might immediately pop out at you while other things might not. If you record your time using a spreadsheet, upload it into a tool like Claude or ChatGPT to help you evaluate your results.
While you don’t need any tools to get started, I do recommend making time tracking a more permanent fixture of your workflow. Clock in and out of tasks to get a better sense of how you actually spend your time. You’ll become more aware of where you’re wasting time which will help you allocate it towards more productive work activities or ideally, toward things that make you happy.
Have you performed a time audit? What was your biggest takeaway from the experience? Share your thoughts in the comments.
Life expectancy data according to the National Conference of State Legislatures: https://www.ncsl.org/resources/map-monday-average-us-life-expectancy-39-998-160-minutes