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Do you know what takes up your time? Kate discusses how getting an understanding of where your time is being spent is the first step to working SMARTER!
I’m not going to lie – I love doing timesheets. You’re probably rolling your eyes or dry gagging, but I love data. And the best thing about timesheets is that, if done honestly, it can help us understand where we spend our time.
I know a lot of you don’t do timesheets, and the thought of doing so is brain numbing, but I challenge you to a simple task.
1. Take a blank piece of paper. No seriously, open up the old printer and pull out a blank sheet.
2. Draw a line down the middle of the paper.
3. Name the right hand side column “want to be doing”.
4. Name the left hand side column “what I am doing”.
5. List down at least 10 areas of your job/business/life in each column.
6. Draw a line between anything that matches in the two columns.
What we see from this is that there are things in the right-hand side column (things we want to be doing) that don’t appear on the left hand side. And there are things in the “What I am doing column” that are so far from anything in the right hand “want to be doing” column its not funny.
If you want to go further, first guess how many hours a week you spend in meetings. Then go through your calendar for the last few months and average out the weekly hours.
Do you know where you are spending your time? If an opportunity came knocking would you honestly know you had the capacity to take it on? If you could look at once place to improve, how would you know where the most wasted time was being spent?
The idea behind these questions is that simply having the desire to be able to choose where we spend our time isn’t enough, we must first be aware of our current time use.
Final
question – how many hours a week do you think you spend on bookkeeping? For the
next month, every time you open up Xero and spend some time, quickly log it in
your calendar. How accurate is your estimate? Is this something that is on your
“want to do list”?
Work smarter, not harder and start to invest time into the things you WANT to be doing.
Need help getting on that path? We can help. Get in touch with our awesome team today.
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