How much of your workday is productive?
If you're like most business leaders, the answer might surprise you. Studies show that the average professional spends 53% of their day on "busy work"—not actual work.
That includes emails, meetings, and task switching, all of which chip away at the time that you could spend driving real results.
A time audit can help. It's a simple way to get visibility into how you spend your time, so you can spot inefficiencies, streamline processes, and refocus on high-priority activities.
In this guide, we'll walk you through how to run a time audit in just one week and use the results to take control of your daily schedule.
Table of contents
- What Is a Time Audit?
- How to Do a Time Audit
- Time Audit Worksheet
- Questions to Ask Yourself During Your Time Audit
- How Prialto Can Help
What Is a Time Audit?
A time audit is a simple but powerful way to track how you spend your time during the workweek. It's like checking your calendar and your habits for leaks.
The goal is to record everything you do for five workdays and categorize each task into a few key buckets, such as:
- Strategic: Long-term planning, growth initiatives, essential tasks
- Tactical: Project management, check-ins with team members, and execution work
- Administrative: Scheduling, inbox management, expense reports
- Waste: Unnecessary meetings, distractions, repetitive low-value tasks
By the end of the week, you'll have a clear picture of where your time goes and how much of it is moving your business forward. Most leaders are surprised by how much time gets pulled away from priority tasks.
A time audit doesn't mean you'll track every second forever. It's a short-term tool to help you optimize your schedule and build better time management skills.
How to Do a Time Audit
You don't need fancy time tracking software to run a time audit. Just something you'll use; that's the real key to insight and better prioritizing.
Here's a step-by-step guide to get started.
1. Select Your Tracking Method
Start by choosing a way to track your time.
Here are a few options:
- Pen and paper: Quick, low-tech, and always accessible
- Spreadsheet: Great if you like structure and want to see totals easily
- Time tracking apps: Tools like Toggl or Clockify can automate part of the process
What matters most is that you pick the one that feels natural to you. A time audit only works if you stick with it every day for the whole week. So choose the method that fits into your workflow, not one you'll dread opening.
2. Categorize Your Time
Once you've picked your tracking method, it's time to set up your categories. Categorizing your time helps you spot patterns quickly and makes it easier to "time-block" your day when reviewing the audit later.
Break your day into 30-minute increments and assign each block a category based on your task. Keep your categories broad enough to be useful, but specific enough to give you insight. This will help you identify patterns and spot opportunities to spend less time on admin or low-value tasks and more on high-priority work.
Here's a list to get you started:
- Strategic time: Planning, goal-setting, business development
- Meetings: Team check-ins, 1:1s, internal or external
- Client calls: Sales, onboarding, support, relationship management
- Vendor calls: Tool demos, account reviews, negotiations
- Email: Reading, replying, inbox triage
- Admin: Scheduling, travel booking, expense reports
- CRM work: Data entry, pipeline updates, lead follow-ups
- Reporting: Weekly or monthly reports, metrics review
- Analysis: Deep dives into data, customer insights, performance reviews
- Personal time: Breaks, lunch, errands, non-work obligations
- Distractions: Social media, unplanned chats, context switching
You can adjust the list to fit your role and the day-to-day work, but once you lock in your categories, use the same set all week. That consistency gives you a clear view of how your time is spent.
3. Start Tracking
Now it's time to put your time audit into action.
Set a timer or alarm to go off every 30 minutes during the workday. When it rings, pause and record what you spent that time doing. Don't overthink it, just choose the category that best fits what took up most of your time during that block.
If your tasks were mixed (like answering email during a Zoom call), go with the one that dominated your attention.
Because you've already built your list of categories, logging your time should only take a few seconds. The key is consistency. You're not aiming for perfection, you're aiming for a clear enough picture to see where your time is going and how much is spent on high-impact work.
4. Audit Your Time For a Week
Stick with your time tracking for a full work week. Logging five days of activity gives you a complete picture, not just of your daily productivity, but of your overall weekly rhythm.
You'll start to notice patterns:
- Are your Mondays packed with back-to-back meetings?
- Do you hit a focus groove on Thursday afternoons?
- Are Fridays consistently cut short or full of catch-up tasks?
Tracking for a week helps reveal when you're most productive, when distractions creep in, and how your workload flows from day to day.
With that insight, you'll be in a much better position to make smart changes to your calendar, delegate lower-value tasks, and create space for the work that really moves the needle. You'll also be able to create your ideal day where
5. Analyze Your Results
Once you've tracked your time for a week, it's time to step back and look at the big picture.
Out of your 40-hour workweek, how much time went toward:
- Strategic work (growth, planning, decision-making)
- Tactical work (executing key initiatives, managing projects)
- Administrative tasks (email management, scheduling, data entry)
- Personal activities (breaks, errands, life admin)
- Low-value tasks or distractions
Maybe you're spending 15 hours a week on low priority tasks that could be delegated. Maybe you realize your best thinking time is getting eaten up by meetings. Or maybe you find you're only spending 5 hours on strategic work, and it's the part that drives the most impact.
Use your audit to pinpoint what's working and what's not. That's how you start reclaiming your time and redesigning your week to boost productivity and focus.
6. Put Your Learnings to Work
Now that you've got a clear picture of how you're spending your time, it's time to make it count.
One useful way to take action is by using the Eisenhower Matrix. It helps you break down your tasks into four simple categories:
- Important and urgent – Do these right away
- Important but not urgent – Schedule these for focused time
- Not important bt urgent – Delegate if possible
- Not important and not urgent – Eliminate or minimize
Take the tasks from your time audit and slot them into these buckets. You'll quickly see where your time is being well spent, and where it's getting drained.
Use what you've learned to:
- Block more time for strategic work
- Delegate admin or task-heavy items
- Cut out distractions and low-value tasks
- Build a schedule that supports your priorities, not just your inbox
A time audit is only as valuable as what you do with it. With just a week of tracking and a bit of reflection, you can start making smarter decisions about your work habits.
7. Take Control of Your Day
With your time audit complete and priorities clear, you've got a few smart ways to take back control of your schedule.
Here are a few options to help you stay focused and productive:
- Outsource urgent but low-value tasks: Delegate scheduling, inbox management, research, data entry, and more to a virtual assistant so you can focus on the work only you can do.
- Time-block your calendar: Set aside dedicated time for strategic work, deep focus, and even breaks. Protect those blocks like meetings.
- Revamp your task management system: Simplify how you organize and track tasks. Tools like Asana, Trello, or a VA-powered system can keep you on top of what matters.
- Build in regular reviews: Set a weekly check-in to make sure your time still aligns with your goals.
The key is to be proactive. A time audit helps you understand your week, now it's up to you to reshape it into something that works for you, not against you.
Questions to Ask Yourself During Your Time Audit
As you track your time throughout the week, reflect on why you're doing it and what it's costing you. These questions can help you spot patterns, identify roadblocks, and surface opportunities to improve how you work.
Ask yourself:
- How much time am I actually dedicating to strategic work?
- How much time do I spend on email, Slack, or other communication tools?
- How often am I trying to multitask, and how effective is it?
- Am I spending too much time in meetings?
- What tasks drain my energy the most?
- What times of day am I most focused and productive?
- Are there tasks I'm doing that someone else could handle?
- Which distractions come up the most, and how can I avoid them?
- Do I have enough time blocked off for deep work?
- What types of work give me the most impact for the time spent?
The more honestly you answer, the more value you'll get from your time audit, and the more clarity you'll have when it comes to optimizing your schedule.
Time Audit Worksheet
To make your time audit as easy and effective as possible, it helps to use a time audit worksheet that breaks your day into manageable chunks. Below is a sample layout to track your activities in 30-minute increments from Monday to Friday.
Use your custom list of categories—like strategic work, meetings, admin, or email—to fill in each block.
This simple template gives you a clear snapshot of how your time is spent over the course of a workweek.
|
Time |
Monday |
Tuesday |
Wednesday |
Thursday |
Friday |
|
8:00 – 8:30 AM |
Strategic work |
|
Team meeting |
Strategic work |
CRM updates |
|
8:30 – 9:00 AM |
|
|
Meeting prep |
|
|
|
9:00 – 9:30 AM |
Team call |
Client call |
Team call |
Admin tasks |
Reporting |
|
9:30 – 10:00AM |
Admin tasks |
CRM updates |
Admin tasks |
Reporting |
Strategic work |
|
... |
… |
… |
… |
… |
… |
|
4:30 – 5:00 PM |
Email wrap-up |
Strategy notes |
Admin tasks |
Deep work |
Early sign-of |
Sample task categories:
- Strategic work
- Team meetings
- Client/vendor calls
- Admin tasks
- CRM updates
- Reporting
- Deep work
- Planning
- Personal time
You can recreate this worksheet in a spreadsheet, notebook, or time tracking tool, whatever keeps you consistent throughout the week.
How Prialto Can Help
If your time audit shows that too much of your week is spent on admin, task management, or low-impact work, you don't have to tackle it alone. That's exactly where Prialto comes in.
We provide fully managed virtual assistant services that help small business leaders stay focused on what matters most. Our trained VAs handle scheduling, inbox triage, CRM updates, research, reporting, and more—so you can spend more time on strategy, leadership, and growth.
Best of all, we don't just hand you an assistant and walk away. We build and manage the entire support system for you—from onboarding to training to performance management—so you get consistent, proactive support without any of the hassle.
Your time is your most valuable resource. A time audit can show you where it's going. Prialto can help you take it back.