How do you do a time audit as a leader?

That is all a time audit is. Two lists, one week, and the gap between them.

What is a time audit?

A time audit is a look back at where your hours actually went, set against where you meant them to go. You take one recent week, sort the hours into a few categories, and see what share went to the things you say matter most.

It is not a productivity system and it isn’t a timesheet. You are not trying to account for every 6 minutes. You are trying to answer one question: does my week look like my priorities?

For most leaders, the honest answer is “partly”. The audit tells you which part.

Why does a time audit matter more at the top?

Because at the top, your time is the strategy in practice. Every hour you give something tells the people around you it matters. Every hour you don’t give tells them it can wait.

There is also less structure to protect you. A new manager has a job description and a boss who notices when the important work slips. A chief executive or a member of the executive team mostly sets their own week, and everyone else is trying to get into it.

The best-known research on this comes from Michael Porter and Nitin Nohria at Harvard Business School. They tracked the time of 27 chief executives, coded in 15-minute blocks, around the clock, and gathered more than 60,000 hours of data. MGMA’s report of the study notes that those CEOs averaged 37 meetings a week, taking 72% of their total work time. About 36% of their time, the report says, “was spent in reactive mode, handling unfolding issues, both internal and external.”

Their main advice is the reason a time audit is worth doing. Porter and Nohria argue that a leader needs a personal agenda for their time, because “Without one, demands from the loudest constituencies will take over.” They also suggested a quarterly review to check that the coded schedule matched the agenda each CEO had set.

That is a time audit, by another name.

How do you do a time audit, step by step?

Block 45 minutes, open last week’s calendar and work through 4 steps.

Step 1: Write down your top 3 priorities (5 minutes). Not your whole strategy. The 3 things that, if they moved this quarter, would matter most. Write them as outcomes you could point to, such as “new pricing live in two markets” or “a successor ready for the operations role”. If you can’t get to 3, that is a finding in itself.

Step 2: Count last week’s hours (20 minutes). Go day by day and put every working hour into one of these buckets:

• Priority 1, priority 2, priority 3: time where that priority was the main point.
• Internal meetings: reviews, updates, one-on-ones and committees that didn’t serve a priority directly.
• Email and messages: reading and replying, wherever it happened.
• Operations and firefighting: problems that arrived and needed you, approvals, escalations.
• External and customers: customers, investors, partners, the board, the press.
• Other: travel, admin, everything else.

Round to the nearest half hour. Your calendar covers the meetings. For email and firefighting, make an honest guess, then add a bit, because most people undercount both.

Step 3: Work out your priority share (5 minutes). Add the 3 priority buckets together and divide by your total hours. That percentage is the headline number.

Step 4: Find the biggest mismatch (15 minutes). Look at the category that is largest compared with what it deserves, and at the priority that got least compared with what it needs. Usually one gap explains most of the story. Write it down in one sentence.

What does a time audit look like for a real week?

Here is a worked example. It is a hypothetical leader with round numbers, not a real person.

Say you worked 50 hours last week. Your top 3 priorities are a new product line, a key senior hire, and fixing a margin problem in one division. You sort the week like this:

• Priority 1, the new product line: 4 hours
• Priority 2, the senior hire: 3 hours
• Priority 3, the margin problem: 2 hours
• Internal meetings: 18 hours
• Email and messages: 10 hours
• Operations and firefighting: 8 hours
• External and customers: 3 hours
• Other: 2 hours

That adds up to 50 hours. Now the arithmetic:

• Priority hours: 4 + 3 + 2 = 9 hours.
• Priority share: 9 ÷ 50 = 18%.
• Internal meetings: 18 ÷ 50 = 36%.
• Email and messages: 10 ÷ 50 = 20%.

So the 3 things you would put on the first slide of any board pack got less than a fifth of your week. Internal meetings alone took twice as much time as all 3 priorities together. Email, at 10 hours, took more than all 3 priorities combined.

The biggest mismatch is clear: internal meetings at 36% against priorities at 18%. The margin problem, at 2 hours, is the priority most at risk, because 2 hours a week is roughly what you give something you are keeping an eye on, not something you are fixing.

Now the one change. Suppose you move 3 hours a week out of internal meetings and into the margin problem. You might do it by sending a deputy to one weekly review and cutting another from 60 minutes to 30. The new numbers:

• Priority hours: 9 + 3 = 12 hours.
• Priority share: 12 ÷ 50 = 24%.
• Internal meetings: 15 ÷ 50 = 30%.

That is one change, and your priority share rises by a third, from 18% to 24%. Over a 46-week working year, 3 hours a week is 138 hours. That is more than three full working weeks on the problem you said mattered, found without working a minute longer. (The Calendar Audit tool suggests moving about half the gap between your biggest category and your top priority, 7 hours with these numbers; starting with 3 is fine.)

If you’d like to see how much those internal meetings cost the people sitting in them as well as you, How much do recurring meetings cost my team? has the formula. We call that weekly drain the meeting tax.

What should your priority share be?

There is no right number, and you should be wary of anyone who gives you one. The share that makes sense depends on your role, your company and the season you are in.

A chief executive in the middle of a fundraise will spend more time outside. A chief operating officer will, rightly, carry more operations. And some meetings are how priorities move, so they belong in the priority buckets, not against them.

What matters more than the number is the direction and the reason. If your priority share is low because the business is in a genuine crisis, that is a choice you can defend. If it is low because the calendar filled itself while you weren’t looking, that is the gap worth closing.

Research suggests the shape of a leader’s week is more than a personal habit. In a study of 1,114 chief executives across six countries, economists Oriana Bandiera, Stephen Hansen, Andrea Prat and Raffaella Sadun analysed CEO diary data and found two broad behavioural types. The ones they call “leaders” focus on multi-function, high-level meetings. The ones they call “managers” focus on one-to-one meetings with core functions. Firms run by the first type were more productive on average. The authors suggest different firms need different types, and they estimate that 17% of the CEOs in their sample were mismatched with their company. The point for a time audit is simple: how you spend your week is not neutral, and it is worth knowing what pattern you are in.

Why doesn’t my week match my priorities?

Because other people can add to your calendar and your priorities can’t. Meetings, requests and problems arrive with a time and a name attached. Priorities arrive with neither, so they get the leftovers.

A few patterns show up again and again:

• Recurring meetings outlive their purpose. A weekly review set up for a crisis two years ago is still running. Nobody owns ending it.
• You are the escalation point for everything. If problems reach you because nobody else is allowed to decide, firefighting becomes your job. The post on the real cost of indecision at work looks at how decisions queue behind one person.
• Email fills the gaps. Fifteen minutes between meetings is too short for a priority and just right for 6 replies. Over a week, those gaps add up to a working day.
• Priorities have no time of their own. If a priority has no fixed slot in the diary, it competes with everything else every day, and loses.

None of these is a character flaw. They are the natural shape of a senior calendar when nobody pushes back. A quick check on the pushing back:

What one change should you make next week?

Make the smallest change that closes the biggest mismatch. One change you keep is worth more than five you abandon by Wednesday.

Pick from this list, based on what your audit showed:

• If internal meetings are the gap: cut one recurring meeting in half, or send a deputy with a clear brief. Ask whether you need to decide anything there, or only hear what was said.
• If email is the gap: read and reply in two fixed blocks a day, and close it in between. Tell your team how to reach you for anything urgent.
• If firefighting is the gap: list the last 5 things that reached you, and pick one kind you could hand down with a written limit.
• If a priority got almost nothing: book a 2-hour block for it, every week, at a time you are sharpest, and treat it like a board meeting.

Then tell someone. Your assistant, your chief of staff or a peer on the executive team. A change that someone else knows about is a change you are more likely to keep.

How often should you audit your time?

Once a month for a quick check, and once a quarter for a proper look. That matches the rhythm Porter and Nohria suggested for the CEOs they studied, and it is often enough to catch drift before it sets.

Calendars drift back. A meeting you cut gets rebooked under a new name. A crisis ends but its daily call doesn’t. A short, regular audit catches this early, and it gets faster each time because you know your categories.

Keep the same 3 priorities between audits unless they have genuinely changed. If they change every month, the audit has found a different problem, and it is not about time.

Where can you run a time audit in 3 minutes?

You can do everything above on the back of an envelope. If you’d rather not do the sums, the free Calendar Audit does them for you. You type in your top 3 priorities and last week’s hours by category. It shows the share of your time that went to your priorities, the biggest mismatch, and one change to try next week.

It takes about 3 minutes, needs no sign-up and runs in your browser. It uses only the numbers you type in, and nothing is sent anywhere. It isn’t a verdict on you as a leader. It is a mirror for one week, so you can decide what to do with the next one.

If you want to look at the habits behind the hours, The 42 Test is also free. It asks how often you say no to new work to protect focus, alongside 41 other everyday behaviours. The Meeting Tax calculator puts a price on the meetings you keep. And for more on leading at the very top, see CXOs.