How To Do a Time Audit & Eliminate Distractions For Good

Have you ever heard of the popular children’s song “We’re Going on a Bear Hunt”? No? Well, here’s how it goes and what it has to do with time audit.

The lyrics go something like this:

We're going on a bear hunt
We're going on a bear hunt
I've got my binoculars
I've got my binoculars
I'm not scared
I'm not scared

The song then describes children going through tall grass, a big river, mud, and finally, a cave. Once in a cave, they face a bear, quickly get out, and run home, not interested in hunting the bear again and admitting they are scared.

And funny enough, this song reminds me so much of doing a time audit.

You want to perform a time audit to see where your time actually goes.

You’re not scared; it’s all fun and games since “you already know where your time goes but just want to make sure”.

But once you analyze the results, you suddenly get terrified to change your habits and set a new work agenda.

So you end up running from the results, just like the children ran from a bear.

We're doing a time audit
We're doing a time audit
I've got my tracking app
I've got my tracking app
I'm not scared
I'm not scared

It sure is dark in here
What's that in the corner?
I see LinkedIn doomscrolling
I see watching YT videos
I see messaging friends back and forth
I know what that is!
What?
Time-sucking activities!
Let's get outta here!

Doing a time audit shouldn’t be daunting. In fact, it should be motivating and the first step towards making positive changes that will contribute to your goals and productivity.

In this article, we'll explain how to do a time audit correctly and not be afraid to face its results or change your habits. Performing time audits will help you determine time-sucking activities and eliminate distractions for good.

Let’s get to it.

What is a time audit?

A time audit is the process of tracking time and seeing exactly what you spend your time on in a particular period. Basically, it’s a deep-dive into your time allocation.

The purpose of performing a time audit is to learn about time management habits and, if they don’t serve you or your business, change them. Running a time audit means saying goodbye to guesstimates (and your flawed memory) and hello to harsh facts.

Why should you run a time audit?

Doing a time audit is the only way to define the intention/action gap.

So, performing a time audit can help you streamline your day and make intentional choices about how you utilize minutes and hours of your work days.

Moreover, time audits are great if you struggle to complete tasks and always feel too busy. Sometimes, there’s a lot on your plate, and you truly can’t get anything done, but sometimes you run out of time and can’t pinpoint why. That’s when a time audit comes in handy.

And remember: we all have the same 24 hours a day, and if that’s all we get, we might as well try to find more free time to work on things that matter to us. After all, time is a non-renewable resource, so we should know how to manage it.

Note: The goal of a time audit is not just to boost your productivity and make you hustle harder. It’s also to fill newly added space on your calendar with the things that are important to you and bring you joy, like hobbies, spending quality time with your loved ones, exercising, practicing mindfulness, etc.

Pros to running a time audit

Running a time audit is an excellent way to:

How to do a time audit

Running a time audit should be quick and painless.

It involves documenting a period in which you’ll log your activities and the amount of time you spend on each activity. After your time audit, you’ll have a clear snapshot of where your time and energy go each day.

Here are a couple of steps you need to take before performing a time audit:

• Find a way to document what you spend time doing.
• Choose a common week to track, like a week full of standard work days (i.e., don’t track time when you’re about to go on vacation, are busy working with a major client, when you have an unusual amount of meetings, etc.)

Now, here’s a step-by-step guide to starting and finishing a time audit.

Step 1: Use an alarm or a time tracking app

The first step is deciding whether to use a manual alarm or a time tracking app.

If you choose a device with an alarm, like a smartphone, it’ll track your time fine. But every time an alarm rings, your focus will be disrupted. I mean, who wants to track time and have a device ringing next to their ears every 15 minutes or so?

That’s why the best option is to choose a time tracking tool that will hunt and note down all your activities efficiently. Preferably one without the alarm system, so you can focus on your work and let the tool work for you.

A tool like Memtime. 🙂

Here’s what’s so cool about Memtime:

If you want to use Memtime to perform a time audit, start a 14-day free trial. That way, you’ll have more than enough time to run an audit and see how Memtime can help you boost efficiency and productivity on a daily basis.

Step 2: Define the categories you want to track

Your days usually consist of several repeating activities.

For example, as a freelance designer, you probably spend most of your time designing/doing creative work, replying to emails, attending meetings, finding new clients, doing personal branding, etc.

So, before you start time tracking, write all these categories down (e.g. creative work, marketing, communication, etc.), so you can track how much time it really takes you on each area of your work day. If you need some further help with it, you can explore our article where we decode time tracking categories for you.

Step 3: Start tracking/recording time

With Memtime, there’s really nothing you need to do in this step.

Memtime doesn’t have START and STOP buttons. It’s just there. Open Memtime and start working like you normally would, and Memtime will capture all your activities in programs, meetings and even calls.

And if you manage a team and would like them to try Memtime, you can choose our team trial by booking a call with us:

• You’ll get custom onboarding according to the specific needs of your business.
• We’ll ensure that everyone on your team understands the benefits of automated time tracking and how Memtime can help them run time audits.
• During the trial and time audit, you’ll recognize the value of daily automatic time tracking and how it can improve prioritization, accountability, and project management.

Step 4: Track your time for a week

Tracking your time for a week can seem like the most difficult part.

A lot can come up in those five business days. And there will be days that might skew your results because they don’t fall under the “standard workdays”.

But don’t worry. The goal is to see what your week looks like in terms of time and recurring tasks. Sometimes, your week gets busier and less organized. Whatever the case may be, feel free to track even the most hectic days, as the target is to have a pool of data showing your work throughout a consecutive period.

What should you do with all that data?

Once you have gathered at least a week’s worth of data, it’s time to analyze it and define potential areas of improvement. Here’s how you can do so.

Pinpoint time-wasters

Time-wasters are recurring activities that don’t benefit you. They make you unproductive and should be limited to a particular time throughout the day or fully restricted.

Some examples of time wasters include internet browsing, scrolling on social media, watching YouTube videos, etc.

Define high-priority tasks

… that you just can’t seem to complete.

High priority tasks are the ones that will move you towards achieving your goals but usually stand “on the shelf”, untouched, because you couldn’t find the time to complete them.

A great example of such activity is client outreach, like emailing prospects or connecting with them on LinkedIn. If you find a way to squeeze in sending LinkedIn messages to potential clients, at least one message per day, that’s five messages in a week. And you are off to a much better start than no messages per week.

Merge or break down your activities

Depending on how long it takes you to complete particular tasks or activities and whether they occur multiple times throughout the day, you should either break them down or merge them.

Here’s what I mean.

If your captured activities show that you do one task multiple times throughout the day (like checking emails or messaging clients) find a way to complete such activities once or twice per day. So, for example, if you tend to check your emails at least 7 times throughout your day, define times when you’ll check your emails: once in the morning and once before you finish work.

Similarly, if there is a gigantic task you try to complete each day but can’t seem to get the hang of it, break the task into smaller activities and assign them into specific time blocks in a day.

Create a new action plan

Once you have defined time-sucking activities, the tasks that you can’t seem to complete, and the ones that occur multiple times throughout the day, you can move on to creating a new action plan.

And any action plan is based on realistic and clear goals, such as finishing X project by a particular date, removing 4 out of 5 distractions, spending an extra 30 minutes on a particular recurring task, etc.

Once you have a few goals in mind, write down high priority tasks and place them in categories.

Then, define how much time you want to spend on each task. I suggest you allocate time using a percentage first, and then you can decide whether that percentage is doable or not based on how many hours you work in a week (no matter if it’s 20 hours or 40 hours per week).

So, for example, let’s say that all your current tasks can be put into the following three categories:

• Client outreach.
• Creative work, a.k.a. your actual work (designing, writing, etc.).
• Current client communication.

We’ll give client outreach 10% of your time.

Creative work can take about 60% of your time.

And you are left with 30% which should go into current client communication.

At this point, you can get granular about your time. If you work 30 hours weekly, 3 hours should go to client outreach, 18 hours to creative work, and 9 hours to communication with current clients (including meetings).

If that seems doable for you, you are off to a great start; if it doesn’t, pivot and see what seems more sensible and pragmatic in terms of time management.

And you’ll see, once you create a new agenda, you can start restructuring your days, step by step.

Be gentle with yourself

There’s just one more thing.

Finding ways to improve your work days is great. Sticking to the changes you made in time management is even better.

But please remember that we as humans are creatures of habits and our brains don’t like or easily accept change. And new behaviors don’t automatically turn into new habits. Precisely, it can take over 60 days for a new behavior to become automatic.

So, be gentle with yourself when introducing changes to your daily routine, but also hold yourself accountable.

Check in on yourself after every week of work and reflect on the progress made that week regarding time management. Celebrating small wins will motivate you to stay on track, be consistent with changes, and improve your time management.

Final words on time audit

Time is the most valuable resource; you can’t go back to the past and buy it back. That’s why learning how to use it better and be more efficient is essential.

To reach new levels of efficiency, you should know exactly where the minutes of your days are going. By tracking time with Memtime, you can find gaps in time management that require your attention and self-reflection. Once you are aware of time management rabbit holes, you can begin to create a daily routine that will help you reach the objectives you’ve always dreamed of.

And remember: improving your time management with an audit isn’t a one-and-done process. You should repeat the process from time to time to stay on top of time management.