In my work as an executive mentor and strategic advisor, I often ask leaders to guess how they spend their time, and then to track it accurately for two weeks.
Surprisingly, there is a significant difference between what they thought and what the tracking shows about where their time actually goes.
Every time.
Peter Drucker — often called the father of modern management — in his book The Effective Executive observed that effective leaders don’t start with their tasks. They start with their time.
Not with planning, but with understanding where their time actually goes. Only then do they attempt to eliminate unproductive demands on their time and plan forward by focusing on what matters.
Making some kind of audit of how you spend your days and weeks — even occasionally — helps you understand where the time actually goes in reality, as opposed to where you think it goes.
It works the way it does in healthcare: before you prescribe a solution, you need to do some diagnostics to understand what’s actually happening.
However, don’t rely on your memory.
If we depend on our memory, we often do not have an accurate understanding of how our time is spent. Memory can deceive us.
When you track in real time, you may be surprised to learn that where your time really went today or last week was very different from where you thought it did.
Why it matters
Time is the limiting factor for everyone. It is the one truly universal condition — we all have 24 hours in a day.
All activities require time, all work occurs within time, and time is irreplaceable. Although we can substitute some resources for others, there is no substitute for time.
We cannot manage time itself. But we can manage our decisions about where and when to spend our focus, energy, and time. Perhaps nothing distinguishes effective leaders as much as how they make those decisions.
When a leader tracks their time and discovers they’re spending 40% of their week in low-value meetings, or that their highest-priority initiative is getting two hours a week instead of ten — that’s not a calendar problem. That’s a leadership decision problem.
The time audit doesn’t just reveal where time went. It reveals what decisions you’ve actually been making, week after week, often without consciously deciding it.
If you want greater effectiveness, a time audit is where to begin. You cannot build better habits on top of a schedule you don’t understand.
My own tracking experience
I’ve been tracking my time consistently for almost a decade. It has become one of my most reliable habits. because what it reveals is always useful.
It started as an experiment. A mentee of mine was struggling to understand where her time was actually going, and I wanted to help her set up a simple tracking practice. Walking her through it prompted me to refresh my own perspective on the process, and reminded me why I started doing it in the first place.
What began as a diagnostic tool became a permanent habit. Early on I tracked time to understand where it was going. Now I track it to make sure it stays aligned with what matters most.
I currently use a dedicated time-tracking app Toggl Track. But the tool doesn’t matter as much as the consistency and honesty of the record. A piece of paper and a pen works. So does Excel. Use whatever makes it easy enough to actually do consistently.
The principle is simple: write down every activity and the time spent on it. Not 100% precision, 90% accuracy is enough. Coffee breaks and wasted time go on the list too. The goal is an honest picture, not a perfect one.
What I observed during a recent tracking week:
- some activities took more time than planned due to the complexity of the issue
- activities I devoted large blocks of uninterrupted time to (1.5 to 2 hours) — were the most successful in terms of outcome and staying on schedule
- psychologically I became more aware of my time and whether it was being spent on the most important activities
- I noticed how much time was taken from me in ways I would otherwise not have noticed
- one day was completely messed up since I did not plan it well
Even though I’ve learned important principles of effectiveness over the years and strive to apply them, there is always room for improvement.
That’s the point of the audit and ongoing tracking — not to confirm what you already know, but to see what you’ve stopped noticing.
Your action this week
1. Start with what you already have
Look at your calendar for the past week or two and build a simple table, even manually: Date, Time start / Time end, Duration, Task or activity, Notes.
Include work tasks, meetings, breaks, interruptions, incoming requests, decisions you were involved in, and personal things during work hours. The goal is not 100% precision, but to capture the majority of where your time and focus went. This gives you something real to work with immediately, without waiting for two full tracking weeks to complete.
2. Start tracking in real time from tomorrow
The tool you use doesn’t matter as much as the consistency of the practice. Use what works for you.
The most important things: that the audit gets done, and that records are made in real time — at the moment of the activity, not from memory later. One full week gives you valuable insights. Two full normal weeks give you patterns.
At a minimum, do this exercise at least twice a year for two to four weeks each time. After each sample, you will rethink and rework your schedule.
3. Evaluate what you find
Once you have at least one week of data, ask yourself:
- What activities take most of my time? Do those activities move me closer to my most important priorities at work and in life?
- What did I plan but didn’t accomplish — or didn’t have time for at all? Why?
- What should I be spending my time on that isn’t currently in my schedule?
If you want to go deeper: paste your time log into Claude or ChatGPT with this prompt “Here are my highest priorities […] and my time log from last weeks. Help me identify patterns, my three biggest time wasters, whether my time allocation matches my stated priorities, and what I should stop, delegate, or protect.” This turns a week of data into a strategic conversation in minutes.
4. Plan your next week in light of your answers
Observe how it changes both your results and your sense of being in control of your days.
You won’t need to write down your days indefinitely — though it helps develop a subconscious awareness of how you’re spending your time. As you do this, your natural awareness grows.
The question “Am I focusing on the most important and meaningful things right now?” stops being something you have to ask deliberately. It becomes part of how you think and part of who you are.
That shift is the real return on two weeks of tracking.
What would you find if you tracked your time honestly for the next two weeks, and how different would it be from what you’d expect?
Cheers, Andrey Sergeyev
For short ideas on leading, living and scaling business with focus on what matters – follow me on Linkedin
You might also enjoy:
Get practical ideas every Thursday
Join hundreds of leaders who lead and live with focus on what matters.
No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.