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Every CEO, founder, and executive I’ve met periodically struggles to manage their time. Metaphors of spinning plates, plates too full, and being pulled in too many directions collide with feelings of overwhelm and wanting to pull one’s hair out and run away to hide in a corner.
The solution begins with conducting a “Time Audit.” Like all decisions, we need information—data—to make them. To audit your time, you need to do three things with the data on how you spend your time:
After reading this piece, I’m confident you’ll have the tools to:
The first step is to record how you spend your time. This isn’t something you need to do every day, every week or every month. But I (and Peter Drucker does, too) recommend you do this twice a year for ~3-4 weeks at a time, as our discipline tends to drift after a while.
It doesn’t matter where you keep a record of your time. All that matters is that you do it. A few methods I’ve seen work are a simple spreadsheet, a private channel in Slack where you message yourself every time you switch tasks and then roll the data up later, or reviewing your calendar (so long as your calendar reflects how you actually spent your time). If you have an EA or Chief of Staff, you can ask them to assist you in the process (oh, and if you are an EA or Chief of Staff, suggest this to the executive(s) you support!).
When you’re tracking your time, be sure to classify it. It will be tempting to group activities functionally (e.g., marketing, product, etc.), but that won’t help you decide what to keep doing, stop doing, or delegate. You’ll want to record the specific activities. Instead of classifying an hour as “marketing,” “reviewed product marketing messaging draft” is much better. Similarly, “sourced 25 candidates for head of sales role” is much better than “hiring.” You can add higher-level categories later, but it’s much harder to remember specific activities at the end of the day or week than at the moment. Here’s an example of how I tracked my time this week in Notion:
Tracking my time in Notion this week.
It’s scary how fast you’ll forget how you spent your time, so as a general rule of thumb, the sooner you record the activity after completing it, the better. To ensure you track and classify your time, I recommend setting up a calendar event before, during, or after lunch, as well as at the end of your day, to record the details of your morning and afternoons, respectively.
Beyond making sure you track your time, you must keep a record that reflects the truth. If you’re using your calendar as a source of truth to review at the end of a day, make sure the block that began the day as “lunch” that turned into a walking meeting with your head of marketing reflects that.