Reclaiming Your Hours: A Leader's Guide to Time Auditing

Ready to confront the uncomfortable truth about where your business hours actually go? This eye-opening episode tackles the critical practice of conducting a thorough time audit—a powerful tool that reveals which activities genuinely move your business forward and which ones secretly drain your profitability.

We dive into the post-summer transition period as the perfect opportunity to analyze how you're spending your working hours. The discussion centers on the importance of tracking not just your obvious work tasks but also the sneaky time thieves like social media scrolling, endless research rabbit holes, and other forms of "productive procrastination" that feel busy but yield little return.

You'll learn how to filter every business activity through two critical lenses: Does this task directly contribute to your established 90-day goals? And could someone else complete this at a lower hourly rate than what your time is worth? This combination of goal alignment and delegation potential reveals your biggest opportunities for reclaiming productive hours and focusing on high-impact work.

The episode provides practical guidance for conducting your own two-day time audit, including when to schedule it, what to watch for, and how to use the results to transform your workday. Special attention is given to social media usage and research obsession—two areas where entrepreneurs consistently underestimate their time investment and overestimate the return.

Ready to stop wasting hours on tasks that don't actually grow your business? Listen now, then schedule your own time audit to discover where your most valuable business asset is really going. Your future self (and your profit margins) will thank you.

Chapters

• 0:00 Getting Back After Summer Break
• 0:35 Why Do a Time Audit
• 1:22 Social Media Time Traps
• 2:17 Research Rabbit Holes
• 3:47 Aligning Tasks With Goals

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:01

For a lot of us, the summer has been a season where a lot of us will travel, we'll see family, we'll take a week off here or a couple days off here. It can often feel like it's difficult to get back. We talk about leaving ourselves breadcrumbs to get back to our business and know where we left off. Well, today I want to talk about you doing a time audit, because, as a leader in your business, you need to know where you are wasting time, where potentially, you could delegate it to someone else for far cheaper than what you should be charging for that hour. It's taking you to do something and you can also determine if what you are doing is worth it. Is it impacting your bottom line? So what I want you to do is I want you to take a look up and, over the course of the next two days where you are consistently in front of your computer, where you were doing the work, not where you're off um taking your kids back to school shopping, when normally you'd be um doing your blog post. So if it's not quite where you're at yet, you're still maybe in summer mode. I want you to do this once the kids maybe the first week of school. Once you are back in front and into a routine, I want you to sit down and do a time on it where you're really watching to see what is taking you, how long it is taking you and what you're accomplishing and if it's in line with your goals. If you have done your 90-day through my 90 day plan program, you know that it's important that you look at your goals to then align the projects and tasks that are going to go with those. So if you're doing tasks that have nothing to do with your goals, what's the point? Is it actually going to again impact your bottom line? So I want you to take a look at this, really sit back, take a look at what you are doing and what your day consists of. How long are you in front of the computer? How long does it take you, like if you feel that it's necessary to be posting on Facebook or Instagram, or any social media for that matter, how long is it taking you? I'm not just talking about the posts that you're creating, I'm talking about how long are you getting sucked into social media, then, or are you getting on there and posting, or are you going on and engaging, or are you just randomly watching a bunch of reels that have nothing to do with your business and you just lost hours because you fell into the rabbit hole. I really want you to determine this. This also goes through if you are researching anything.

Speaker 1: 2:23

I know a lot of people, before they will start something and jump into something new, will want to do all of the research. They want to watch all the YouTube videos. They want to understand, inside and outside, how to make it work. Well, is what you are trying to do actually going to impact your bottom line? So a perfect example is in Insiders.

Speaker 1: 2:39

We've recently been talking about the importance of making sure that your homepage and landing pages are well organized. We talked about how you can use categories in order for this to happen, and some of my Squarespace clients had questions about how to get categories work. And I am very honest and will always say I use WordPress. I've used WordPress for years. That is all that. I really understand how to use. I understand Squarespace at a very what would they say, not even molecular, like very low level. I've had some clients that have worked with it. I understand how to make a blog post, how to get pictures into it. That's about it. I don't understand the interworkings of categories, so my thought process is let's find a YouTube video. They find a YouTube video. Now they're digging into it. How far are they going to continue to go with this? Are they keeping it they have 20 blog posts and just using three categories and making it as simple as possible or are they diving deeper into it and really making it more complicated than it needs to be?

Speaker 1: 3:38

This is something that you need to determine when you're doing your time on it. We do have a habit of going down rabbit holes. We find one thing out about categories and then we think we got to figure out something else because someone said something in the YouTube video that got us all excited about. Now, maybe using another tool within Squarespace. I want you to make sure that you are looking at is what you are doing in line with your goals? If using keyword research and SEO and making sure that your site is easy to navigate is in line, because you're trying to make sure that your audience is completely engaged and seeing you as the resource, then yes, that makes sense to do the organization portion of it.

Speaker 1: 4:18

But then if you go off a rabbit hole and all of a sudden you're looking at plugins, potentially on Squarespace or applications where you are going to be posting social media.

Speaker 1: 4:27

Is that in line with the goals that you had? Are you just wasting time? And that's the purpose of the audit is to really sit down and make sure that what you are doing is impacting the goals that you have set for yourself. Now, if you haven't set 90 day goals, or you have my program and haven't used it, I'm going to highly recommend that you go in and create your 90 day plan. This is the perfect opportunity to do it. You are going to go into September, october, november, and then you can take December to do the same exact thing and then take a look at January, or you can come to Insiders Retreat and get a really dialed in customer journey and 90 day plan. Either way, I want to make sure that you are setting goals for yourself and making sure that the projects and tasks that you are doing are in line with what you are trying to accomplish for yourself and your business, and if they're not, let's get rid of some of them.