#75. Three Ways to Know Where Your Time is Going
Episode Shownotes:
Ever wonder where your time is going? The answer lies in a time audit. The only problem? Time audits can take, well, time. That's why in today's episode, I'm sharing three simple ways you can incorporate a time audit into your hectic schedule and walk away with clear, accurate insights about how you're spending your time. Discover the pros and cons of these three types of time audits and how each method can be tailored to fit your unique needs and improve your work-life balance.
Are you sick and tired of feeling overwhelmed by all the things? I can help. Schedule a free consult today.
Come join the SLP Support Group on Facebook for more tips and tricks!
Follow me on Instagram! @theresamharp
Learn more about Theresa Harp Coaching here.
Episode Transcript*:
Welcome to Work-Life Balance for Speech Pathologists. I’m Theresa Harp, an SLP and productivity coach, and this podcast is all about how to build a successful career as an SLP and still have time for yourself and the people and things you love. So if you’re ready to ditch stress and burnout for a more balanced and fulfilling life, then you are in the right place. Let’s dive in.
[00:00:00] Hello podcast listeners and members of the SLP Support Group. This is a video podcast, and I am recording episode 75 of the Work Life Balance for Speech Pathologists podcast. So welcome. You are listening here on the podcast. Thank you for tuning in. If you are watching this in the Facebook group, welcome.
Say hello in the comments. Let me know if you are watching. You can comment hashtag replay. I just love knowing who's listening. listening, what your feedback is, what your questions are, how I can support you. So this is a perfect opportunity for you to ask any questions that you have, share any comments, and really get the most out of this topic.
And I'm happy to support you. So if you are not in the Facebook group, but you want that added level of [00:01:00] support, make sure you click the link at the show notes to join. We would love to have you in our community. All right. So today I am talking about time audits and I just want to offer before I dive into this specific topic, I want to preface this by saying, if you did not hear Episode 74 of the podcast, which is why a time, which is all about why a time audit is helpful, and also why so many of us do not Do time audits like what are those obstacles that keep us from checking in and viewing and and sort of addressing and looking at what are we spending our time on?
Because I cannot tell you how many clients I have worked with that really just don't know where their time is going. And this is not a judgment piece by any [00:02:00] means. This is very real, very human. I know I myself feel that way often during the day where I look at the clock and I'm like, Oh my gosh, it's three o'clock.
What have I been doing? Where did the time go? And now, luckily, and through a lot of, uh, deliberate intentional work, that doesn't happen as often as it used to for me. But I know that it has happened to me. It still does happen to me. It has happened to my clients. It's happening to clients. And so it's probably happening to you as well.
And if we don't know where our time is going, then it is very difficult for us to make reasonable, realistic, and sustainable changes to what we're spending our time on. So, make sure you go back and listen to that episode. If you haven't, because it will really walk you through why this is important, why you should consider doing it, and I'm sure you have all the reasons in the world for why you've never done something like a [00:03:00] time audit, and I can probably promise you, pretty, pretty much, with pretty good reliability, that I have Heard all of the reasons before and I can offer you a different perspective that perhaps you haven't considered.
So make sure you go back and listen to that episode. All that to say, go back and listen to episode 74. All right, but today what I'm going to be doing is walking you through Three ways that you can approach a time audit. So if you are someone who is on board with the benefit of knowing where your time is going, but you're sort of struggling with figuring out how to do a time audit in a way that is realistic, and it's not going to be all that cumbersome and time consuming, Ironically, then this is the episode for you.
So I'm gonna give you three different [00:04:00] approaches and kind of walk you through what the pros and cons are to each of these approaches. Now, these are not the only ways you can do a time audit, and I love to partner with clients to figure out ways that we can really customize this approach for my client's individual strengths, individual sort of lifestyles, if you will, learning styles, all of that.
So you might now need to think outside the box a little bit, but as you're listening to each of these options, think about what could work for you. All right, so let's talk about it. The first way that you can Complete a time audit is probably the way that you think of when you think of doing a time audit.
And that is through what I'm going to call the traditional time audit approach, where in this approach, you're essentially tracking the [00:05:00] individual tasks and activities that you're spending time on. And you're doing this tracking. Live, like as it's happening in real time, okay, and you're doing this over a set period.
So it could be throughout one day. It could be throughout several days. It could be throughout a week. It's really going to look different for every client or for every person, depending upon what information you need. Okay. But with the traditional time tracking approach, you are basically logging or tracking.
What you're spending your time on and for how long. So how long are you spending on that particular task? And you might do this either through pen and paper, you know, maybe you're keeping track in a notebook, you're writing it down, maybe you're doing it electronically in, say, uh, an Excel spreadsheet or a [00:06:00] Google sheet, or maybe you're doing this in your phone.
I'm sure there are. time audit apps that exist. You might be listening and you may know about them. I don't know what they are. I don't use apps to track time. I find them to be personally a bit of a rabbit hole when it comes to tracking time, but I do understand that they can be very beneficial for people.
So that might be another thing to look into if you're interested in doing a time audit, but you've been struggling with the actual execution of this. You might look at some time audit. apps. But I personally, I'm not very tech savvy. So what I have done in the past, I've done time audits in different ways.
One was through a, in an Excel spreadsheet. And I think I talked about this a little bit on last week's podcast episode and shared my personal story of when I was responsible for doing a time audit for myself before I became a coach, [00:07:00] and that was using Excel. Um, but now if I were to do something like this, I would do it in my notes app just very simply.
I keep everything in my notes app. It's accessible. I have my phone. It doesn't disappear. I can search for information within that app. So that's just what works well for me. All that to say, you don't have to do this in any fancy way. It doesn't necessarily need to have any bells or whistles. You can do this as simply as possible.
Okay. So with the traditional time audit approach, where you are again, tracking what you're spending your time on as you do it, so you're tracking the task itself, and then the amount of time that you're spending, there are different advantages. to doing it this way. And then, of course, there are some limitations.
So let me walk you through some of those very, very quickly. Okay. Pros, advantages to this approach. Number one is that this will give you a very detailed [00:08:00] granular overview of how your time is being spent, okay? And you can go as specific and detailed as you want on this, or you can be a little bit more broad, uh, you know, zoom out, so to speak.
That's really up to you. But! When you are doing this through the traditional approach, it's very easy to then see what some of the patterns are. So you can kind of highlight very quickly, okay, I see that during, say, for example, the morning hours, I'm actually spending about 25 30 minutes scrolling in my bed before I even get up, get out of bed, and start my day.
That's a pattern that can become evident very quickly, very easily when you are doing a time audit through this traditional approach. Okay. Can also help you to identify really [00:09:00] specific, what I'll call time wasters or time sucks. The things that you're just wasting time on because you're doing this in the moment.
You're tracking it as you go. And so it really gives you that specificity that some of these other time audit approaches do not give you. Okay. So those are some of the advantages of a traditional time audit approach, but some of the disadvantages of this approach is number one, it can be very confusing.
tedious and it can be time consuming to do this on the go throughout your day, right? It's going to take time to then stop what you're doing, input it into whatever modality you're using, whether it's in a spreadsheet, in your phone, in an app, on a pen and paper, whatever that is, okay? But It can be, so it can be time consuming and it can be disruptive and it can be [00:10:00] tedious, okay, because you're now taking time away from your day, disrupting the flow to track these things.
It also requires a good amount of consistency and discipline, self discipline. Because you have to trust that you're going to follow through and track those little time sucks or those little time spenders, if you will, even for the things that aren't necessarily a time suck per se, maybe they're actually productive and you're, you have no issues with With what you're spending your time on, but you still have to interrupt what you're doing to track it that way.
Okay, so it really does require a level of consistency and a level of discipline. And the other challenge with this approach is that it can be particularly difficult for. Let's say situations where [00:11:00] there is a disruption or maybe an inconsistency in your schedule. So let's say, for example, you, it's a Monday and you're tracking your time and you are at work and you have a client who cancelled.
So now you have an opening in your schedule and if you were just kind of tracking what you're spending your time on, you might say, you know, you might write down like scrolled for 20 minutes, but it's not necessarily reflective of the fact that that 20 minutes would have been spent in a therapy session providing intervention, but you had a change in your schedule, right?
So. There's that piece. Or, if you think about this, how, you know, as SLPs in particular, our schedules change a lot over time. Some, for some of us, no two days are alike. And so you might get a picture of what this particular day is [00:12:00] like, but that might not necessarily be a pattern of every Monday. So, you know, maybe next Monday, your schedule is different because you didn't see maybe one of your clients was in every other week client.
And so now you're not seeing that client this week. But you will be seeing them next week. And so there can be some sort of discrepancies, if you will. And of course, as we know, our schedules change. So those are some of the drawbacks to this type of a time audit approach. Having said that, though, I really think that think that a lot of these challenges or obstacles are things that are probably going to apply regardless of what approach you're using to track your time.
And I don't want those to be reasons why you don't complete a time audit. If you are really serious about changing the way you're spending your time, if you're really serious about taking back the [00:13:00] Ownership over your time and really making shifts and improvements in your work life balance. This is something that you need to do.
This is information that you have to have, and it does not have to be perfect. We understand. I understand as a coach that what is Reflected and documented in one time audit might not necessarily represent every single day. We get that, but this is still information that is really, really helpful, even if it's not necessarily true for every Monday or every weekday or every month, whatever the pattern is.
All right. So that is, in a nutshell, the traditional approach to time tracking or to completing a time audit, if you will. And what I want to offer before we move on to the second Approach is that the traditional way of completing a time audit is particularly, in my [00:14:00] opinion, particularly useful for those of you who are detail oriented, who really value specificity and precision and data collection, and who really want to know the nitty gritty of the process.
where your time is going and you're really self sufficient, um, self disciplined, and you can follow through on those, you know, consistent actions of documentation, of documenting your time for the greater good, for giving you more information, okay? So that is, if that is you, any of that, if that describes you in any way, the traditional time audit approach might be best.
That's the first, that's the first way you can do this. A second way that you can do a time audit, this is a more of a, this is more of a [00:15:00] reflective approach instead of a time now approach, like live in the moment where In this second approach, which we'll call the retrospective time audit. In this approach, you are essentially going through your day, and instead of tracking your time in real time on the go, you are pausing and reflecting back on how you spent your time.
Now, you can do this throughout the day, like you could pause during your day, maybe halfway through your day and do the first half of your day and then at the end of your day, complete the second half of your day. Where you're kind of reflecting back, what did I spend my time on, and you're tracking it, you could do this once at the end of the day.
I personally wouldn't go any further out than that, because I think once you do, if you try to retro, [00:16:00] retrospectively track your time for more than one day's worth of time, I think you're really running the risk of memory getting in the way of accuracy. So I don't suggest doing it any, any longer than that.
But I do know some people that will do this sort of like at the end of the week or at the end of every couple days. So if that's you, then great. You know you best. I tend to think that the clients that I work with, the people in my world, we aren't really the best at recalling that information. It's no, it's not necessarily any indication of our own skill set as people, as SLPs.
It's more to me an indication of just this kind of busy season of life that we are in and all of the many, many responsibilities and, and tasks that we're juggling throughout the day. Okay. So with the [00:17:00] retrospective approach, you are again, reflecting. Looking back and reflecting on what you spent your time on and so you're basically reconstructing your day from memory and you're documenting what you spent your time on and how much time you spent.
Okay, so some of the pros. of this approach is that it is less cumbersome or maybe less disruptive is a better way to describe it because you're not stopping during the day itself and tracking things so it's not disrupting your regular, you know, workflow or your home life or anything like that. Okay. It also is nice because it can prompt you to really pause at the end of your day, or maybe even during your day, as I said before, to reflect not just on what you're spending your time on, but sometimes what happens then is When clients take this approach, they're then also reflecting [00:18:00] on other things.
So they're reflecting on, you know, what went well about my day? How did I feel today? What happened that stood out? Like it sort of lends itself to more of that journaling and maybe some You know, review, reflection, meditation, all like that kind of stuff that can be really, really supportive of your own mindset, work life balance, all of that.
It can also really help build some self awareness. Okay, so those are some of the advantages. Of course, it's also, in some regard, easier. to do it this way because you're not constantly having to stop what you're doing to track your time. Having said that though, I have found personally this approach would not work for me unless I was doing it throughout the day, multiple times throughout the day, like every few hours stopping, pausing, and looking at and [00:19:00] reflecting on what I was doing.
Because it really relies on a good amount of memory. And memory, as we know, can be inaccurate, right? It also tends to be less detail oriented. The time audit itself, the information that you get, tends to be less detail oriented and more sort of generic, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but I have found that there are a lot of little tiny time sucks that we, as as humans find ourselves doing that we might overlook in something like this retrospective time audit.
Okay. And that can be really, what's the word? It can be misleading because it gives us, it doesn't give us a whole picture. It doesn't tell us sort of the details, the nitty gritty of what, of where there are [00:20:00] opportunities for improvement. Okay, and this approach, in my opinion, is probably the better approach for those of you who might find the traditional time audit approach just to be too time consuming or too overwhelming, too cumbersome.
Um, maybe you just. Think about stopping your day and tracking things and you know, as a person, maybe you know yourself and you might say, I'm never going to be able to do that. I'm not going to remember to do that during the day, or I'm going to be resentful of having to stop. And I'm going to just tell myself, Oh, I can just do it later.
Right. So. That might be, this approach might be better for those of you who might be, have had thoughts like that about the traditional time audit. This approach might also be better for people who are [00:21:00] neurodivergent, people who have ADHD. It's funny, as I was saying this, as I was saying this, I just had a message pop up on my screen.
And it, it. got me distracted. I was distracted. So anyway, what I was trying to say was this retrospective approach might be better for those of you who are neurodivergent and might get easily distracted if you are stopping every so often to fill in information or to track data, okay? And this approach might be really good for those of you who naturally find yourselves reflecting on your day at the end of the day.
Maybe you are someone who journals, maybe you are someone who sort of sits and meditates and reflects on how your day went. So that might be something that you, this time audit, this retrospective time audit might be something that you can just sort of infuse into what you are already doing. Okay. So if that's you, [00:22:00] this approach might be a good fit.
Okay. The third approach that I'm going to offer on today's episode in today's training, if you will, is what I will call the thematic time audit approach. Or in my mind, it's sort of like the time bucket, time audit, where, and if you don't know what time buckets are, that's a whole other topic, for a whole other day.
We've got some podcast episodes about that. But anyway, let's stay focused, Teresa. Okay, so, with this sort of thematic. time audit approach, you are basically tracking the different categories of tasks or categories of activities rather than every single task that you spend your time on. So for example, And with the thematic [00:23:00] time audit, you might be looking at your day and saying, okay, so from 9 to 11, that was for the most part, one on one sessions, so I will label 9 to 11 as intervention.
And then from 11 to 1130, I did have a break. So at that point, it was administrative time. And then 1130 to 230 was pretty much all intervention sessions again. And so you might track that as intervention. Then you might have, okay, 230 to 315 commute. And so you might mark that as commute, right? So you can sort of chunk these blocks of time and label them according to the general category of what you were spending your time on.
And you can do that live, you know, in, well, I was going to say in real time, it probably [00:24:00] wouldn't really be, it's not going to be as frequently as the traditional time audit, but it's probably going to be a little bit more frequent than the retrospective time audit approach, but you can do this. as frequently or infrequently as feels right for you.
Okay, so with the thematic time audit approach, some of the advantages for doing it this way is that because we're sort of categorizing your time more broadly, it's simpler, it's easier, there are fewer sort of obstacles, in my opinion, to following through as a human who is trying to keep track of your time, right?
If we know that it's just sort of in these like broad categories, it might be easier for us to actually follow through and track time this way, because we're just focusing on these patterns and let's be honest, many of us kind of know what these patterns are [00:25:00] already like you might be listening to this and you might be able to kind of think about your day and fill this in yourself without really even Paying a whole lot of attention to what you're spending your time on.
This might give you some insights very quickly and very easily. This approach is also really good for people who want to sort of find these patterns of patterns of spending, if you will, where it can kind of show you, okay, wow, client sessions, client sessions, client sessions, lunch, um, commute, commute, commute, or travel, right?
It can sort of show you these, where these big chunks of time are going. And that can be really helpful for people who are struggling to sort of gauge why they're feeling so out of balance or to really sort of get a broad picture of where your time [00:26:00] is going without having to be so detail oriented.
Okay? That is also another advantage for those of you who are listening who are not very detail oriented. This approach, this thematic time audit, might be a good fit for you. It might also be a good fit for you if you really just kind of want that high level information, that high level overview of where your time is going.
Um, and you really are maybe wanting to show, either prove or show to yourself what you're spending your time on, or maybe to administration if you work for someone, say in a private practice or in a school setting, you really want to demonstrate the balance or imbalance of how your time is being spent.
Um, and this is a really good approach for those of you who are just kind of slammed and really don't want or can't commit to a time consuming time audit approach. Okay? [00:27:00] That would be good for you. this approach would be good for you. But some of the disadvantages of an approach like this is that because it's so sort of broad, it's like broad strokes time audit, it doesn't really identify those time wasters.
It doesn't show you necessarily those same specific tasks that are taking up your time, it can also result in, or I guess a better way to say it is you run the risk of missing some categories of time that maybe aren't as lengthy. but really are a category in and of themselves or in and of itself. So for example, let's say lunch, I'm thinking of lunch.
Okay. Let's say you have like a 30 minute lunch break at some point in your day, but that 30 minutes is wedged between two hours of sessions and then another two hours of sessions. So what [00:28:00] you might do with this In this time audit approach in this thematic approach, you might sort of lump that whole chunk of time to intervention, right?
You might label it as intervention, but you might overlook that 30 minute period of lunch, and so it can skew the results that you're getting, and it can also sort of negate or overlook some of the Areas of your life where you are spending time, but you're just not spending as much time. And you'd still want to know about those pieces, those areas, but you run the risk of overlooking them in this thematic time audit approach.
Okay. So that's another sort of drawback to this approach. Alright, so those are three ways that you can complete a time audit. Three approaches or styles of time audits that you can complete. Just to sort of recap for you, okay? You can, number one, [00:29:00] do the traditional time audit approach where you are essentially tracking everything that you're spending your time on.
You're pretty much doing it in real time or frequently, periodically, throughout your day. That's the traditional time audit approach. The second time audit approach that I offered was the retrospective, where at the end of your day, you're looking back and tracking what you spent your time on. And then the third approach that I described to you was the thematic approach, where you're just chunking blocks of time.
And you're labeling your, your time audit that way. You're, you're filling out your time audit according to those categories or chunks of, of time. Okay, three different approaches, none of which is particularly perfect, but that is not the goal. Really, what you want to do https: otter. ai More information, like any bit more, any [00:30:00] more information that you have about where your time is going, in my opinion, is useful information, even if it's not 100 percent accurate, even if it's not giving us the whole picture and there are gaps, like for me, Um, some information, some detail is better than nothing.
And I also have found, this is getting a little meta, but I've also found that when I do time audits with my clients, just the process of having a client go through and do the time audit can give incredible insights, not even to what you're spending your time on. Like that is just. That's separate, but just in the process itself of how you approach something like this, it's going to take up more time.
That's going to be unfamiliar. That's going to be somewhat of a challenge, right? It's sort of like a microcosm for what you're already doing in your life, like the things that we already are spending our time on. How you approach this [00:31:00] time audit can also can often be indicative and give us information of how you approach other things in your life that are taking up your time.
But that is. Not necessarily the point of a time audit. I just wanted to share that because in my opinion, and my clients know this, what I say in coaching sessions is everything is information. It's just all information. Even if it's not giving us all of the information, all of what we're getting is information that is neutral.
It is just neutral information that we can use and that we can learn from. So I'm inviting you to do some version. Of a time audit just to really see where your time is going. And even if you choose to not do anything with this information, which if that's what you decide, that's absolutely fine. That's your prerogative.
But I would offer that sometimes just a little glimpse of a time audit, a little, [00:32:00] you know, a little section of a time audit can be really eye opening in terms of where we're spending our time and what kind of Changes we wanna make. Also, just not just also showing you, we has the time. Audit has the power to show you opportunities where you have more control over your time that maybe you are necessarily realizing and sort of helps put you back into the driver's seat, so to speak, of how you spend your time.
Alright, so that is. an overview of time, different time audit approaches. If you are watching this in the SLP support group, tell me below in the comments, what are you walking away with? What, if any approach are you going to try? Which approach of any are you going to try to try? And if you are listening to this podcast episode, feel free to share this with somebody else who might need to hear it, but never underestimate the [00:33:00] power of. leaving some feedback about the show so that I know what information is helpful and what you want to hear more about. All right, that's it for today. I will see you all next week.
*Please note that this transcript was generated by AI and may contain errors.