“Those who don’t know history are destined to repeat it.” ~ Edmund Burke
An article by Melissa Raffoni asks if you are spending your time the right way. Well are you?
It’s a good question.
Her concept here is mainly geared toward managers, but I think some of the points are good for anyone who wants to be more productive.
photo by sanja gjenero
The most important tip by far is the time audit. I’ve compared the time audit before as being like an income audit. If you don’t audit where your money is going, it’s likely you are LOSING money on crap. It’s the same with time, if you don’t know where your time is going, you are likely wasting it too.
And here’s the problem: Time is more valuable than money. You can waste money and still earn more, but you can never earn more time. Which makes the time audit all the more important.
“Take out last week’s calendar, and evaluate it using your newly established time allocations for each category. This will give you a sense of how much adjustment will be necessary going forward. Record how you spend your time in a time-management log-for many, this very discipline is half the battle.”
Let’s just suppose you are wasting your days now but don’t know it? Isn’t that the same as not knowing your history? And aren’t you more likely to repeat a history if you don’t know it?
You can do your time audit very simply by drawing a chart on a piece of paper or printing one from Excel. List your top goal, time with friends, time with family, time surfing the web, time doing real work each week. Then write down the amount of time spent in each area.
At the end of the week, take a look. And now ask yourself pointedly about how you’ve spent your time. Do you like the outcomes? If you aren’t putting major time into your major goals is there any question why you might not be doing as well as you would like?
If you are satisfied with what you did on the prior week, then great. You’ve got a trophy of sorts you can use to model the coming week, weeks and months. 
{ 1 comment }
Great post Brad! I have done a few time audits for myself according to Peter Drucker’s “Drucker Analysis” and it can be very revealing to see where all your time really goes by your own doing! I definitely recommend others to find and do a few time audits! Valuable for sure.