- How do you spend your time on any given day?

And I just don't mean, how do you spend your day

or what do you do?
I mean, how do you really spend you time?
How did you really mobilize the resource
that is the hours and minutes of your day?
It's actually really hard for us to get a clear,
detailed and honest sense of what we do
with the 24 hours in any given day.
And without having a clear sense of how we spend our time,
it can be really difficult to make changes
in how we manage our time.
And so what we're going to talk about now is one method
to get a better grip on how we spend our time,
so that we can make some decisions about how we might
want to change what we do with the time that we have.
The tool we're going to talk about for this
is a tool called a time audit.
And a time audit is exactly what it sounds like.
It's a way to audit the way you spend your time,
the way the IRS can audit the way you spend your money.
It gives you information about how you're prioritizing
your time, it gives you information on what you value,
and it gives you a better sense of where you might be
wasting time, or where your time could be better spent.
When we do a time audit, we're interested in the answers
to a couple of questions.
The first is obvious.
How am I actually spending my time?
Sure, I have a general sense of what I do.
I go to school, I go to work, I sleep for eight hours,
I eat meals, but what are we actually doing
with the 24 hours?
Getting as detailed a sense of that as possible
is the really important piece of doing a time audit.
We also want to get a sense of how important the tasks are
that we are making time for.
Are we making time and prioritizing really important tasks
or less important tasks?
Or, are we prioritizing the things we need to do for school,
or for work, or for our life and our family?
So that answer is also really enlightening.
Time audits also help us get a sense of how we
distract ourselves and how we might be wasting our time.
And finally, gives us a sense of whether or not
we're making enough time for the things
that are really important in our life and the things
that are non-negotiable.
When you do a time audit, essentially what you're trying
to do, as I've said, is think about all of the things
that happened in your life.
And again, when we think about our day,
we're used to thinking about big, robust categories,
like school, or work, or friends.
But when we do a time audit, the best time audit
is one that thinks about time in a more granular way,
and thinks about activities a little bit more specifically.
So rather than just school, we might think of time we spend
in lecture, time we spend in lab, time we spend
in recitation, and time we spend moving between our classes.
When we talk about spending time at home, we might think
about the time we spend sleeping, the time we spend
watering our plants, the time we spend doing household
chores, the time we spend on the phone with our mom.
And when we think about our relationship, we might not
just think about our primary or secondary relationships,
but all of the relationships in our life
and the time that they take.
And don't forget the other things that don't seem
that important, things like social media, TV watching,
or keeping your Snapchat game on point.
These things take time in our lives,
and they're important to us, so when we do a time audit,
we have to include them all to the best of our ability.
Remember, a detailed time audit is an effective time audit.
Once we do our time audit, we have a better sense
of how we're using our time, but there are
a variety of ways to actually accomplish this.
One way to get a better sense of how you're using your time
is to do something called the alarm method.
That is, setting an alarm on your phone to go off
every 30 minutes or an hour, and every time it does,
write down what you're doing.
Sure, this won't give you a super detailed sense
of how you're spending your time, but it will
add color and detail to your understanding
of what you're doing day in, day out.
You can also do micro-reviews, in three- or six-hour chunks
or in daily chunks, to try and estimate how much time
you're spending during any given period or during any given
day on specific categories of activities.
You can do weekly reviews.
Sitting down at the end of a week and trying your best
by looking at your calendar, looking at your phone,
and getting a sense of how you're actually spending
that time during any given week.
Again, you're getting estimates, but it is giving you
some additional information.
For very detailed information, you can actually use
phone apps, or apps on your computer.
Apps like RescueTime that ask you to track your activity
in a more detailed way and can then give you a more
comprehensive sense of what you're actually
doing with your time.
And finally, I encourage you to talk to the people
in your life about your time audit.
Sometimes, people who are close to you can give you
some information about how you spend your time
that you might not even be aware of.
The most important thing to do in all of this,
whether you're setting alarms on your phone, whether you're
using an app, or whether you're talking to friends,
is to be as candid as you can with yourself
about how you're spending your time.
Don't leave activities out.
Try to estimate as accurately as possible how long
things take, because, again, the more accurate
your time audit is, the more detailed a sense you have
of what you do with your time, the better your information
will be as you move forward to try to do something
about how you spend your time.
Here's an example of a time audit that someone's done
during their day at work.
You can see a list of activities that are given,
and you can see that someone has tried to capture
how much time each of those activities take.
They've even gone so far as to give a graphic representation
of what they're doing with their time.
Again, what's really useful here is that in a single glance,
you can get a sense of what kinds of activities
are being prioritized, and how the hours of each day
are being invested.
This gives you a data point, or a set of data,
to then go on and make decisions about how to move forward.
Once you've completed your time audit, there are a couple
of things that you can do to try and make
that information useful, and to action that information
into things that you can do.
The first is to think about your perception of time
versus the reality of your time audit.
How are you perceiving the way you spend your time,
and how are you actually spending it?
Noticing discrepancies in your perception versus reality
can give you an important sense of how you think about
the time in your day.
And that can help you make changes
a little bit more quickly.
The second is you want to categorize your tasks.
What kinds of tasks are you spending the most time doing?
Are they important tasks or unimportant tasks?
Are they tasks that you have to do,
or are they tasks that can be delegated?
Are they tasks related to work, related to school,
or related to your family?
By creating some broad categorizations of how you spend
your time, you can get a quicker sense of what you're
prioritizing, and that can give you a better way
of moving forward if you'd like to make changes
to how you're spending your time.
Another thing that you should do is identify time drains.
Activities that are taking a lot of your time.
If they're draining a lot of your time, those activities
should be meaningful and should be important,
and if they're not, you might try to avoid them.
Now, let me say quickly that not all time drains
should be avoided.
There are some things that we spend time doing,
things like watching TV or socializing with friends,
that may not technically be important for our work
or our school, but they're restorative to us,
and they help us perform in school.
And so, it's important not to avoid every time drain,
but it is important to know what they are, so that
you can minimize their impact on your time management.
Use your time audit to become a better estimator
of how long tasks take to do.
Once you start getting a better handle on how long things
actually take you to accomplish, it can become easier
to manage your time.
Identify the non-negotiables in your life.
What are the things that you need to spend time doing
that are absolutely crucial to your health,
happiness and success?
They might be things related to school, but they might be
speaking to your best friend on the phone, spending time
with your children or doing something in your faith life.
So make sure you know what those are,
and make sure there's time to do those things.
And finally, once you take a look at your time audit
overall and once you have a clearer sense
of what you're doing with your time, don't completely
revolutionize the way you spend your time overnight.
Doing that kind of change abruptly is not sustainable.
Instead, make thoughtful, small, manageable changes
to how your spend you time, because those thoughtful,
manageable changes are going to lead to big changes overall,
and they'll continue to be sustainable.
It's important, as you think about managing
your time better, to do so in a way that's going to
allow you to be viable moving forward,
and to use that precious resource as well as you can.