How To Run A Time Audit That Improves Team Productivity
Time Audits vs. Time Tracking: A time audit digs deeper than basic time tracking. It helps you evaluate whether your time is aligned with your priorities—so you can spot misalignments and take action.
Spot the Time Drains: Time audits reveal hidden inefficiencies—like bloated meetings or scattered priorities—so you can fix them and get your team running smoother.
When to Audit: The best time to do a time audit? When you’re overwhelmed, starting something new, or troubleshooting a slipping timeline. Use it as a reset button.
Implementation Steps: A strong time audit has three phases: track, analyze, and adjust. Skipping the follow-through means missing the real impact.
Common Mistakes: Avoid vague entries, ignoring after-hours work, or skipping the analysis. These mistakes will tank your audit’s usefulness—and your results.
We’ve all heard the famous saying that “time is money.” Time management is a vital part of project management because understanding how team members are spending their time also helps you understand how much money you are spending on the project.
Conducting a time audit allows project managers to gain insights into how team members spend their time and which tasks they are focusing on, as well as the amount of time it’s taking them to complete those tasks. Without this data, it can be challenging to identify operational inefficiencies or areas of poor performance that, if rectified, could yield cost savings.
In this article, I’ll provide a step-by-step guide to performing a time audit that can enhance your time management habits and boost your productivity. I’ll also explain when to conduct a time audit and share some common mistakes to avoid.
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What is a Time Audit?
A time audit involves logging how you’re spending your hours for a defined period of time (usually days or weeks) and then analyzing the data to understand where your time goes.
Performing a time audit is different from time tracking because you’re intending to use the results to improve your time management skills. The goal of a time audit is to figure out whether your daily activities align with your high priority tasks. Additionally, the time audit process helps you identify and reduce the incidence of time-wasting activities.
For project managers, time audits can uncover inefficiencies in how team members are spending their time, ranging from excessive time spent in meetings, to unplanned interruptions that derail deep work, to misaligned priorities, and more. The effectiveness of this method is backed by time management statistics.
Why Should You Perform a Time Audit?
You might consider conducting a time audit as a way to take control of your time and develop an action plan for optimizing your daily routine.
Specifically, time audits are useful for:
- Identifying time wasters: You might be surprised to find that your daily schedule is riddled with distractions—like social media—that add up to time lost throughout the day. A time audit exposes the hours you’re spending on low-priority tasks so that you can spend less time on them in the future.
- Aligning time with priorities: Once you understand how you’re spending your time, you can review your daily activities and reprioritize your time to focus on your most important tasks.
- Improving productivity and efficiency: Time audits also provide insights into unnecessary idle time that can be eliminated by streamlining or automating your existing workflows.
- Enhancing delegation and resource allocation: Time audits provide visibility into who on your team is working on what tasks and for how long. Discovering that a task is taking a team member longer than expected or that a senior team member is spending excessive time on routine tasks gives you the information you need to optimize resource allocation based on skill sets.
- Supporting better time estimates and forecasting: Historical data collected from a time audit can serve as a valuable input for generating time estimates for future sprints. It also supports resource forecasting for future projects.
When to Perform a Time Audit
Some appropriate times to conduct a time audit might include:
- During periods of overwhelm or burnout: It’s easy to postpone conducting a time audit since it is never going to be the most urgent task on your list. However, despite the time it requires, it pays dividends—especially when you need a wake-up call to help you reprioritize an already heavy workload and alleviate burnout.
- When project deadlines are slipping: A time audit can help surface pockets of idle time that may arise due to inefficient team handoffs. Knowing where dependencies are slowing you down can help you streamline future handoffs or automate your existing workflows.
- At the start of a new project or role: A time audit can start a project off on the right foot by showcasing how you’re spending your time so you can ensure it aligns with project objectives.
- After implementing a new tool or process: A time audit can help you see whether a new process or tool is saving you time compared to a prior workflow, allowing you to course correct or adjust your investment as needed.
- As part of a quarterly or annual review: Performance reviews are an opportune time for you to audit how you’re spending your workday, particularly if you’re trying to demonstrate the impact your work is having on the business.
How to Do a Time Audit (Step-by-Step Guide)
To help you get started, here is a step-by-step guide to conducting a time audit:
1. Decide Your Audit Duration
While it results in meaningful outcomes, undertaking a time audit takes time. Decide upfront how long you intend to track your time and commit to logging your results in fixed increments so that you can generate good quality data.
I once tracked my time for an entire month in 30-minute increments. While the data I generated was interesting, I probably could have maintained time entries for only a week or two to get the same information. Sometimes, less is more—as long as you track enough time to get a feel for your daily routine over the time period you choose to measure.
2. Choose Your Tracking Method
Once you’ve committed to tracking your time over a given period, decide how you want to record your time spent. Your time tracking tool of choice could be analog (e.g., jotting down time spent in a notebook as you work), a simple spreadsheet, or more comprehensive time tracking apps.
When choosing your time tracking method, consider how easy it is to keep up with your time entries (so you have consistent data) and whether your method of choice lends itself to easy analysis once collected.
3. Record Activities and Time Spent
Once you have your time audit plan in place, deploy your time tracking method of choice to record how many hours you’re spending on a particular task. Use the time increments you established at the outset to make this task more manageable, so you’re not overwhelmed trying to track every minute of every day.
Be honest about how you’re spending your time—it does you no favors to make it seem like you’re doing more (or less) than you are! Also, be sure to keep track of any “free time” in your workday.
4. Classify and Categorize Activities
Once you’ve collected your raw data over the established period, it’s time to review it, classify it based on activity type, and create high-level categories that will help you with future analysis.
For example, when I performed a 30-day time audit, I wanted to understand my time allocation for analytical versus creative versus routine tasks and what time of day I was working on each task type to see if it matched up with when I knew I did my best work.
5. Analyze Your Time Data
Once you’ve got your data cleansed, it’s time to analyze! Review your data to understand how much time you’re spending on the categories you’ve identified. What trends are you seeing? Are there any patterns that you find surprising?
For example, when I conducted a time audit, I was pleasantly surprised to find that I spent more time on creative tasks than I was expecting.
6. Identify Areas for Improvement
The next step after analyzing your data is to identify areas for improvement. Conducting a time audit won’t be beneficial unless you use the data you’ve collected to take action.
In my case, although I was spending more time than expected on creative work, I realized I could be much more efficient with that time if I pursued creative work in the late morning or early afternoon. At this time of day, I was in the right frame of mind (not too focused but not too tired) to think differently about the problems I was trying to solve.
7. Implement Changes and Monitor
Once you’ve identified areas of improvement, implement changes to address those areas and monitor progress to see if you’re achieving your desired outcomes.
For example, I found that my creative output increased even further when I adjusted the occurrence of time blocks allocated to creative pursuits.
It’s also possible that you try out a solution that ends up being unsuccessful. Be willing to experiment until you get there. For example, I initially reserved the last 30 minutes of my workday to review progress and plan the next day, but client meetings kept getting scheduled over that time. I wound up moving my daily review to first thing in the morning, when I had a lower risk of being interrupted.
Tools to Help You Perform a Time Audit
Time tracking software makes time auditing a cinch. For example, you can use tracking tools to create a time audit template, record hours by task, and quickly analyze your results.
Check out our list of the best time tracking software here:
10 Best Time Tracking Software
Here's my pick of the 10 best software from the 10 tools reviewed.
Common Mistakes To Avoid (and How to Fix Them)
Here are some common mistakes to avoid when performing a time audit and how to address these issues if they arise:
- Being too vague when logging activities: It’s a terrible feeling to go back to your notes but be unable to decipher what you did during that time. Make sure you annotate the project you were working on and the specifics of the task you completed to simplify categorization later on.
- Forgetting to track in real time: It’s admittedly difficult to get used to logging your time in regular increments, particularly if this is something you haven’t done. Keep your time tracking method of choice front and center, and include lots of reminders to yourself throughout the day (perhaps on your calendar or a Post-It) until you get in the habit of logging your hours.
- Focusing only on core work hours: You might think a time audit is only relevant for core business hours (e.g., the traditional 9-5.) But, if you find yourself firing up your laptop later in the evening, or sneaking in 30 minutes of work on a weekend morning, that’s also time that “counts” towards your time audit. Be honest with yourself about your hours worked to help you grasp the big picture.
- Not reviewing or acting on the results: While most of the mistakes I’ve highlighted thus far have to do with data collection, tracking your time is a useless exercise if you fail to analyze and, more importantly, act on the results. Commit to carving out time in your schedule to implement and monitor the results prior to initiating a time audit.
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