Try THIS Time Management Strategy

Do this one thing if you want to become an expert in your own time management.

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Hi, my name is Lily. I’m a behavior change coach and the director of coaching and training development at Body Brain Alliance.

Today, you’re going to uncover the #1 tip I give clients who want to improve their time management skills and become a master at being more efficient with their time.

It All Starts with a Time Audit

Let me tell you a little story. I had a client come to me once and say: “I really want to improve my time management skills. I feel like I’m just flying by my day and I look at my to-do list and I’m not getting any of the things done. All that list keeps doing is rolling over to one day after the next, and it always feels like it’s looming over me. I block things in my calendar and I’m not following through. What am I missing?”

This probably feels all too familiar. I love helping clients with time management — however, I often see them jump ahead into what they want their outcome to be without assessing what is currently happening in their life.

That brings me to the time audit.

Why Understanding Your Current Time Matters

If you’re struggling with time management — not knowing how you’re actually spending your time, not understanding where the time is going, or why your priority list just isn’t getting any shorter — it’s important to understand what is currently happening with your time before making a plan of what you think your time should be.

Let’s use a simple example: checking your email. Let’s say you have this idea that checking your email in the morning should take no more than 15 minutes. So you confidently put that 15-minute block on your calendar.

You wake up, get ready, and dive into your email… but before you know it, you get the notification to transition to another task, and you haven’t even gone through a quarter of the emails. This puts you in a position of feeling increased anxiety — like you’re already behind and it was just the first thing on your calendar.

This gives you insight that maybe you’re not having a concrete understanding of how long things take you. We often expect ourselves to be way ahead in our behaviors, goals, and progress than where we currently are — which leaves us frustrated and stuck on a constant hamster wheel.

How to Do a Time Audit

Before you go and put 15 minutes for email and 30 minutes for a meeting and an hour for a project…

Choose 2–3 days during the week — ideally including a weekend day — and retroactively log the time you are spending on certain tasks. Let go of the unrealistic expectation that things “should” take a certain amount of time. Instead, lead with neutrality. Get curious! Become your own researcher.

How long does it take you to go through your email each morning? Note: without judgment and without shame. Look at what time you sit down at your desk feeling fully focused. Log that. Then go through your email at the normal cadence you typically would — and log how long it actually takes you.

Did it take 15 minutes? An hour? We’re not leading with any judgment or guilt here. We are acting as researchers to understand how long things typically take us.

Tips For Time Logging

When you are time logging, account for times where you are human and get distracted — picking up your phone to scroll on Instagram, taking a snack break, making a meal. Account for all of those things when doing it in a neutral, curious way.

It’s giving you so much data to understand where you currently are so that you can make changes from there to improve your time management and efficiency.

Reflect on Your Data

After you have a full day of data where you actually see how you spent your time, reflect on it and determine:

What are some areas that you can be more realistic about? What are some areas where you can be more efficient?

Maybe you notice that as you were working on a certain project, you got distracted pretty often — answering messages from your team in the middle of the project, or picking up your phone to scroll social media. This gives you insight on whether there are skills to develop there, like mind management or cognitive reframes to stay focused.

It also prevents you from overloading your calendar in the future. If you have a much better idea of how you’re currently spending your time, it allows you to become more efficient — and when people ask if you have the capacity to take on something additional, you can look at your calendar and know for sure, without blindly saying yes and feeling overwhelmed.

A time audit can be extremely powerful. It will set you up for long-term success.

Join The Discussion

Have you ever done a time audit before? If so, let us know in the comments — we’d love to hear your experience.

Thank you for reading, see you in the next one!