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An important step in managing your time is to know how you are actually spending your time. A very useful exercise to work this out exactly is to record the minutiae of your day.

There are two ways of working out how long you spend on different tasks: one is to estimate, the other is to record accurately. The second way is better. If you do this for a day (or ideally, longer), you will probably be surprised that many tasks take longer than you think.

Set up a chart on hard copy or on a spreadsheet broken down into the following columns:

Description

Start time

End time

Time in minutes

Priority

For the priority column, choose a level of priority from 1 to 5, with 1 being the greatest priority, 5 the least.

one minute wonder Calculate the hourly rate that you are costing your organization:

 Take the productive part of each day, which is probably somewhere between 50% and 80% – let’s say 65%.

 Say you work 8 hours per day x 65% = 5.2 hours per day that are productive. Say you earn £30,000 per year; then double that to count in benefits and employment overheads = £60k per year.

 Divide that by 52 weeks minus 6 weeks for holidays/illnesses = 46 weeks x 5 days x 5.2 hours per day = 1196 hours per year.

 Round to 1200 hours and divide £60k by 1200 hours = £50 per hour.

 This means that you cost your company or organization £50 for every productive hour you work – an incentive not to waste time!

Recording this level of detail will almost certainly reveal things that you were not aware of about your working day. It may, for example, demonstrate that you spend more time than you had throught in travelling or doing routine tasks (one of my colleagues calculated that he spends a total of 15 minutes every day walking from his computer to the printer and back), or that you spend less time than you should in planning and thinking.

When working out the priority column, consider the following:

 Which tasks are central to your role.

 Which tasks could be delegated.

 Which tasks could be done more effectively.

 Which tasks you should not be doing in the first place.

Calculate your time on different tasks and your hourly rate with overheads.