Time audit template and calculator
Where did the week go? Type what you did. See it in one picture.
Why do a time audit
Most people think they know where their time goes. Most people are wrong by a lot. Meetings feel like two hours and are eleven. "Quick" messages add up to a day. Redoing work that came back hides inside "the project."
You do not need to track every minute to find out. One honest week, in rough hours, is enough to see the shape.
Example
Priya thought she spent most of her week on the launch. Here is what she typed.
| Activity | Hours | Bucket |
|---|---|---|
| Launch tasks | 12 | Planned work |
| Team meeting, standups, 1:1s | 9 | Meetings |
| Slack and email | 8 | Messages and email |
| Redoing the pricing handout after feedback | 4 | Fixing or redoing |
| Helping Sam with the FAQ | 3 | Helping others |
| Expense reports, timesheets | 2 | Admin |
| Waiting on product for screenshots | 2 | Waiting |
The audit showed: 40 hours. Planned work was 12 of them, or 30%. Her biggest bucket was meetings. Fixing and waiting together were 6 hours, almost a full day.
The reflection question: "Of your 9 meeting hours, which meetings ended with a decision or a task? Could the others have been a message?"
Priya did not need an app to see this. She needed to write it down once.
How to use it
- Be rough. Half-hours are fine. Guessing is fine. Honest guessing beats no numbers.
- Put "redoing" in its own bucket. It is the one most people hide.
- Do it again in a month. Compare.
Do it from real work next time
Guessing works once. For a real picture every week, you need the hours to come from the work itself. In M-Tracker, you start a task and the timer runs. Meetings from Google Calendar are counted on their own. At the end of the week, the split is already there, for you and for your manager, without a survey and without watching anyone's screen.
Start free · Guide: Where is your team's time going? Run a one-week time audit
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