Where Is All Your Time Going? (Part 1/2)
Use This Free Template To Audit Your Time Expenditure
Click HERE to access your FREE 168-Hour Audit template.
In the 1930 publication, Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes, the renowned economist, predicted that the millennial generation would be working “three-hour shifts” or a “fifteen-hour week.”
He was laughably incorrect. Alive today in Keynes’ future, it’s safe to say that we’re working longer and harder than ever. In order to meet the competitive challenges of today’s workplace, we throw ourselves into whirlwinds of weeks where we can’t catch seem to catch a break (let alone catch our breath).
According to research by Gallup, the working week in the United States is almost a full working day longer than the global average. And it’s no better internationally. Consider, for example, that in Turkey nearly half the population well over 50 hours per week. If we are to ever regain control of our work week, we need to better understand where our time goes.
Jackie Bavaro, product manager at Asana, recently shared her insights on priority management. In her deck, she outlined a simple way to assess where we’re spending time. Start by making two pie charts: one showing how you want to spend your time and another showing how you’re actually spending your time. Then, open a spreadsheet, and list out your weekly activities until they total 168 hours (the fixed total time allocated to you each week). Next, create three columns:
ACTIVITY — Now, list the following items under this heading: Sleep, Physical Fitness, Eating/Cooking/Groceries, Work/Career, Watching TV/Internet Surfing/Video Games, Miscellaneous (Errands, House Cleaning, etc.), Family/Friends, Self-Care (Shower, Getting Ready, Daily Routine, etc.), Quiet Time (Reflection, Meditation, Journaling, etc.), Education, and Commuting. Feel free to add any other categories not mentioned.
# OF HOURS — Here, list the total estimated hours you spend per week doing each of the corresponding activities.
% OF TIME — Each cell should contain a calculation of the # of hours spent on a specific activity divided by the total weekly expenditure of hours and expressed as a percentage.
A snapshot of my 168-Hour Audit. I‘ve packaged it, along with a free template, that you can access here.
Begin listing how your time is currently spent each week. Your Total Weekly Expenditure should equal 168 hours and 100% of your allocated time. Then, turn this data into a labelled pie chart so that you can visualize your week.
The more you work, the less time you have to spend on other activities, especially time with others or leisure. The amount and quality of downtime are important for your well-being (both physical and mental). In visualizing your time as Bavaro has suggested, you might notice several inconsistencies between what you want (and deserve) in life and what you’re actually doing.
You might realize that you’re feeling stressed not only because you aren’t sleeping enough but because you aren’t factoring exercise or other needs into your weekly routine. You might notice that some of your leisure time is contaminated (i.e., it’s not spent distraction or work-free due to mobile technology).
Do not fill your free time with more work.
In fact, your capacity for creativity depends on the lulls in your schedule. Are you making enough time for a vacation? Are you making enough time for sleep? Are you making enough time to be bored? David Burkus, author of The Myths of Creativity: The Truth About How Innovative Companies and People Generate Great Ideas, states:
Boredom boosts creativity because of how people prefer to alleviate it. Boredom … motivates people to approach new and rewarding activities. In other words, an idle mind will seek a toy. Anyone who has taken a long car ride with a young child has surely experienced some version of this phenomenon.
In a Harvard Business School study of 1,000 US professionals, 94% of respondents said they work 50 or more hours a week with nearly half that group putting in more than 65 hours a week. That doesn’t include the 20–25 hours per week most of them spend monitoring their phones while outside the office. If we aren’t auditing how we spend our most valuable resource — our time — who else will? Nobody ever dies saying, “I wish I’d spent more time at the office.”
Any time I conduct a 168-hour workshop with people (from high school students to senior executives), there are audible gasps in the room when surprising patterns in how time spent is discovered. For instance, we think of a one hour commute every day as necessary. But, how about the 15 minutes preparing for the commute and the 15 minutes coming down from the commute? That’s 30 minutes of time that we usually don’t schedule. Multiply that by five days a week, and we’re looking at 2.5 hours of time unaccounted for.
Gain control over feelings of overwhelm by getting real about where your time is going.
Access your FREE 168-Hour Template by clicking HERE. And make sure you get first access to Part 2 of this post by subscribing to my newsletter, HERE.
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