09 Time Audit: Where Does The Time Go?

Ever end a day exhausted and unsure what you actually did? We pull back the curtain with a practical time audit that trades confusion for solid data. Instead of guessing where the hours went, you’ll learn how to capture your day in 15–30 minute blocks, tag your energy, and turn a week of notes into a better future calendar. 

We walk through a low-friction setup and a short list of questions that expose leaks and misalignments. You’ll see how small moments of distraction add up and how to match your highest-energy hours with your highest-impact work. Using a lawyer-style discipline adapted for real life, we show how this exercise can create freedom. The aim is not perfection. It’s an honest picture that lets you audit your time with intention.

Learn practical insights like identifying your personal golden hours and creating protective boundaries for deep focus. The result is a schedule that reflects your priorities instead of accidents and interruptions. 

Take the one-week challenge with a pen and a legal pad and make changes that stick from an informed position. If this episode helps you reclaim your time, please follow the show, share it with a friend who needs it, and leave a quick review so we can reach more people who want their days back.

Blinn Bates - BlinnBates.com

Woods & Bates, P.C. - Woodsandbates.com

Right Fit Evaluator: https://blinnbates.com/right-fit-evaluator

Chapters

• 0:00 Why Your Time Disappears
• 1:29 The Case For A Time Audit
• 3:12 Phone Screen Time Reality Check
• 3:42 What A Full Time Audit Includes
• 4:17 How To Run The Audit
• 5:17 Finding Patterns And Fixes
• 6:22 One-Week Challenge And Next Steps

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 1:00

Welcome back. Today I want to talk about something that's called the time audit. We all wonder at the end of the day, maybe we're feeling exhausted, unsure of what we accomplished, where did our time go? And I think a time audit can be an eye-opening exercise to figure out what it is we're doing and what changes maybe we should make. We all have some blind spots when it comes to our own time. Most people overestimate how much time they spend on meaningful work and underestimate how much is lost to things like distraction, task switching, interruptions, scrolling, watching TV, Netflix. We can improve if we measure what we're doing, but most of us don't typically measure our time. Time audit can be the quickest way to reveal what our patterns actually are and see where we're at on a week-to-week basis. It doesn't judge our choices, it just shows us what we're actually doing. So then we can make changes if that's something that we want to do. So here's a harsh reality check for us. Pick up your phone, go to your settings, and scroll down to where it says screen time and click on that, and then see all app and website activity. And that's gonna tell you what your daily average time that you spend on your phone, and it breaks it down by app, by category, things like that. You know, maybe we're spending two hours scrolling on Facebook. Is that the best use of our time? And I think if you look at that, probably gonna make you sick how much time you spend on that device. But what a time audit is, is an expanded version of this that our phone is doing for us on the time that we're spending on our phone. The time audit is all of our time, so it's a simple structured log of how we're spending our time on a day-to-day basis. You record what you're doing in small time segments throughout the day, and then we can look over the course of a week or two to see where is our attention going, where is our energy going. This isn't meant to be perfect, we just want to have an honest assessment of what we're actually doing. So, what's the best way to do this? Simple, practical way to do this would be to choose a time interval. In the lawyer world, we operate or had previously operated in segments of six minutes, so tenths of an hour. When we're billing time, that's what we typically use. That's what the ethics board says is advisable in hourly practice. But for convenience and for this purpose, I think a 15 to 30 minute segment would provide some pretty good insights. The key is going to be consistency, not how precise it really is, so that you can get an overall picture of what you're doing. And I would suggest that you record that time contemporaneously. This is a rule we learn in in the lawyer world also that contemporaneous billing is much better than trying to capture the time after the fact and make it up later from our memory because our memory is typically not good. So when we're recording what we actually did, we want to write down 15 minutes spent on X category. So maybe we have some categories of email, meetings, administrative work, deep thinking work, personal work, scrolling, watching Netflix, whatever it is. And then maybe we want to record how we felt while we were doing that. How was our energy level? Was it high? Was it low, medium? And then we can identify patterns at the end of the week. Where did our time leak to? Uh, what tasks are we doing that we shouldn't be doing? What are the blocks of time where we're feeling like we have the most energy that we should probably put our highest best tasks? What are our recurring distractions? What activities are we doing that don't align with our goals? And then work through are things taking us a lot longer than we actually thought they were? You know, is something that we thought should take 30 minutes, taking two hours. This is all about awareness. And the good audit is going to reveal to you when are the most productive times that I should be working, what are my biggest distractions, and does my calendar match up with my priorities? Are we wasting too much time on things that we don't think are important? What do we need to eliminate? What do we need to automate? What do we need to delegate? So I would challenge you this week to complete a one-week time audit. Get yourself an old-fashioned yellow legal pad, carry it around with a pen and write down 15, 30 minute segments. I did this. And then after a week, you can take a look at it, maybe put it into a spreadsheet, play with it, and see here's the patterns that I see, here's the things I need to change, here's what surprises me, here's what frustrates me. I think it's going to be really, really empowering to do this. So start your time audit today. This is gonna be a great way to start taking control of your days, weeks, and months. And that's how you maximize your time and elevate your life.