How to Do a Time Audit and Find Extra Hours in Your Day

• How a Time Audit works and why it’s a powerful tool for improving time management and work-life balance
• Tiny impactful actions that help you save 1-2 hours per day (without feeling like you’re doing more work)
• The biggest time-wasting habits you don’t even realize are draining your energy—and how to replace them with time-saving habits
• Why effective time management is actually about energy management—and how to structure your day for peak productivity
• The #1 mistake people make with productivity tips—and how to avoid falling into the “busy but not productive” trap

“Not having enough time isn’t the real problem—it’s how we prioritize our time that makes all the difference.”

“A time audit isn’t about adding more to your plate—it’s about making time visible so you can reclaim it for what truly matters.”

“We track our money, our calories, and our steps—but how often do we track our time, the most valuable resource we have?”

“Eliminate, delegate, and automate—these three actions alone can give you back hours every week.”

“The goal isn’t just to be productive; it’s to be peacefully productive, creating space for both impact and ease in your day.”

 Not having enough time seems to be the theme of our lives these days. We juggle work, family, personal commitments, business, all the things, and we feel stretched thin and overwhelmed. But what if I told you that you have more time than you think? You’re just not using it in ways that really serve you.

That’s where a time audit comes in, and the time audit is about making time visible. It’s an invisible concept, obviously, but within an order, we can make it visible so that you can make changes that create more space, more energy, and more ease. And the sense of more time in your life. So if you’re feeling like time is slipping away, this episode is for you.

Welcome to the Peaceful Productivity Pod. I’m your host, Anne Rajoo and together redefine productivity and find your sweet spot where peek performance meets happiness. 

 In today’s episode, we’ll cover what a time audit is and why it’s a game changer, how you actually conduct a time audit, what the most common time wasters are, and how you can reclaim your time,  and how this connects to the peaceful productivity approach.

So let’s reclaim your time. Let’s dive in.  Let’s start with why a time audit is so powerful. A time audit is really a simple way to track exactly where and how you’re spending,  your time so that you can potentially see patterns, you can identify distractions, and you can realign your schedule to make sure that the things that matter get allocated the.

Time amount they need and that they should have,  available and maybe that. Eliminate things that waste your time or what I like to call them that are time leaks. So for years I believed that I don’t have enough time. So I was running my business, I had my, well still have my two little kids getting bigger now.

So it feels like things are shifting. Around this area of my life. I, um, what I would call a  multi-passionate person. So I would have craft projects. I, um, for quite some time was making bridal jewelry as a side hustle. I currently teach ak so I always have lots of things going on, and I often felt like I don’t have enough time.

There’s not enough time in the day, and. Oftentimes things were  slipping through the cracks, so I would forget things. I would miss deadlines, and I would just always feel like I’m,  not swimming. I’m drowning in work, and I just wasn’t able to keep up. And so I started with a time audit because I. F was, sure there are pockets of time that I waste with things that are not important or where I am, you know, what I would call dilly dly around and I’m not actually really getting things done.

And so this time audit has really helped me to understand what’s happening, where’s all this time going, these 24 hours in the day, they just never enough. But what am I actually doing with it? So. Because of this constant sense of not having enough time. I was really getting in trouble. I was skipping  my meals.

I wasn’t eating properly. I was just running on coffee and chocolate to keep going.  Like I said, I missed deadlines. I was late to appointments. And even though I live on an island where. That doesn’t matter too much. It is important to me to be on time. So,  yeah, it was just exhausting to be running around like that and just constantly feeling behind.

And eventually my body said, this is enough. Stop doing this and this is not working. And I was struggling with my health and the stress really caused my hair to fall out.  Friends kept asking, oh, have you lost weight? And. I’m already quite thin and so when I lose weight, it, it, you know, like it just, people notice it.

So yeah, I was also like, oh, what’s happening? Are you okay? And eventually I  ended up having a chronic inflammation and that was really the point, was like, this is enough. Can’t go on like this. I need to change things. I need to try something different. And I understood eventually through the time audit that probably.

Not, not having enough time is not the problem, but how I prioritized my time was the actual problem, and so. This is why I’m saying very many people don’t have the problem  of not enough time, but we are not spending our time on the things that deserve your time. And so I would  like you to join me and really, you know, get into this time, order with me.

And while it’s not sexy to track every minute of your day and make notes of what are you doing when and how long does it take, it is not as tedious as it might sound. And it’s not as complicated as you might think. So yeah, the time audit really helps you to see clearly where’s your time going, where are you wasting your time, and where could you align your time better with your values so that it just feels more at ease and the outcome feels more tangible.

 So let’s get into it. Let’s do it. I will talk you through what I would do with a time audit, but I also have a PDF time order document that you can download from my website  and I will link it in the show notes here.

So ideally grab that timeout at PDF, print it out, and there’s a video as well explaining how I use an app that’s called Toggle. There’s many other apps that you can use, but it walks you through how I do the time audit, and I think it would be really helpful to have that by hand. But otherwise just listen.

Through this episode and see where I’m going with this. So for one week you would really literally track your time in a notebook, in an Excel file or in an app like Toggle. So you create this spreadsheet or you just really start tracking with wake up time, let’s say 6:00 AM  and you note down this is, this is the amount of.

Time that I’ve spent in the morning getting ready. Obviously you not wanna write down three minutes brushing my teeth, but you know, overall you get, you get the idea, it takes you 15 minutes in the morning in the bathroom, okay? Then you go on with your kids or then you go on to prepare breakfast. You actually eat breakfast.

So buy. Six 30, you’re sort of ready and so on and so on. And you do that throughout the day. And obviously you don’t have your app with you maybe all the time, but you can have a piece of paper in your bag and just, you know, when you, when you pause, when you stand in the grocery line and you have, you have to wait somewhere or you drinking a coffee, just take that little paper out or in your phone, in your,  in a notepad.

Write down. Okay. I went, you know, took me half an hour to get from A to B. Took me 45 minutes to do the groceries and so on. So you note down as much as you can, as many details as you can when you are working. Okay. It takes me 10 minutes to answer my emails, then I’m. Checking social media for 20 minutes, then I am writing this email response or I’m working on an email newsletter.

Everything that you do, you give it a time and you, you make it visible. 

So once you’ve done that for a week, you go back and you sort of compartmentalize your whole tracking into different buckets. Work like meetings, emails. Project work that you are working on? Personal, could be family time, self-care, exercise, leisure, Netflix, social media, other hobbies that you might have, errands and chores, the groceries, the laundry, the cleaning, the meal prep, and sleep and rest.

 So you create these packets and you. Slot down  these things that you’ve tracked into these buckets so that overall you get an idea of, okay, two hours a day, spend on errands and chores, four hours a day, spend on work, uh, sleep, seven hours, eight hours, whatever it is, so that you actually really get this like sort of pie chart of.

Where is most of your time spent? And I’m assuming that could be work or business for most of us, but it might be interesting to compare that to how much time do we spend on errands, or how much time do we have in the leisure bucket or the family bucket and so on. So you’ve got that whole pie chart laid out in front of you, and then you come back and you don’t have to  do that in all in one day.

It could be in different stages and phases, but what do you wanna do next? As the third step would be a critical eye on analyzing where are your patterns? So when you do your chores or when you are active in your leisure. What? What are the patterns?  When is that happening? For example, is that mostly happening in the mornings?

Is that mostly happening in the afternoon? Are these things that you do in these buckets? Are they giving you energy or are they draining you energy and maybe where out time wasters, where are you stuck in things? That are not actually important, that are not actually representing the value of your time, but you’re still doing them because you’ve always done them or you think you should be doing them.

But maybe there are things with a critical eye that you can pinpoint that are not required, or that someone else, either family member or even a hired help can support you with. And. Really the point is to identify things that you know represent low value of your time and high value of your time. So for me, the family bucket, it’s high value and there is not a lot of white time wasting there.

Because it’s, it’s something that’s important to me, but then leisure when it comes to scrolling on social media or watching a movie, things like that. I know that I’ve, you know, like that I’m not spending a lot of time there, but I, I know that I wanna spend more time on my hobbies. So it’s really looking at this.

With a critical eye and be like, what is happening in this bucket? Is it looking good? Or am I, when I look at this, am I surprised to see, oh, I’m spending so much time on this. Oh, I’m wasting time with that. Hmm. I didn’t realize that. Um, what could it be? Um, I. That, I don’t know. Ironing, ironing is one of my things.

I, I love ironing as my one and only chore that I enjoy, but I also feel that ironing every single piece of clothes is not necessary and not the best use of my time. So I have reduced  the time I spend on ironing. I, I have started to fold away more clothes and iron, which was quite. Difficult for me because I had this thing of I wanna iron my clothes very nicely.

So yeah, I, that was sort of a time waster for me, and I reduced that time so that I would have this time available for something else that has higher value in the time that I have. Okay, so we really want to identify low value time task and high value time task because we want to have more high, high value time  in our day.

’cause they are the things that matter. They are the things that move the needle in our business. They are the things that we enjoy. And overall we just feel more productive when we have more things like high value. Time task in our day. So then the fourth and last step would be to make adjustments.

Obviously you identified maybe some time wasters. You identified that maybe there is some disruption in your day where you’re jumping around too much and maybe you could consolidate a few things or realign your schedule and reshuffle things so that certain buckets happen at a certain time and not, 

work happens this scattered around the day, a couple of hours here, an hour there. Then you go off and you do groceries, and then you come back and you do some more work. Maybe there’s a way to get it a little bit more, what would be the word I. Streamlined. And so you go in and you really think through what could be things that you want to change, and very often I will tell you that by eliminating some of those time wasters, outsourcing, delegating low value activities are really things that can create more hours in your day.

So you will be surprised how many, you know, like accumulating how many minutes, if you can cut some minutes here and some minutes there, how many hours that at the end of the day can create for you. And that that doesn’t have to be every single day. Some days, you know, you might have a really good schedule and you might not wanna make a lot of tweaks there, but there might be other days where there could be improvements.

And the other thing I want to tell you, just. You know, in anticipation of making adjustments very often it can feel uncomfortable because it means maybe asking for help. It means maybe. Stopping certain things that you’ve been doing, like my ironing . But maybe you’ve got to change things around it as in that, and that could cause some resistance.

So I just wanna say that’s very normal. And the one thing that you probably will have to face quite early on when you make adjustments is looking at your boundaries. Because quite often why. We feel scattered and why we have time wasters and energy drainers happening on a day is because some of our boundaries are not,  in the right place.

They might be a little bit too porous to loose, and maybe we need to work on some stronger boundaries. Or maybe there is no boundary at all. 

Or there’s a boundary with, for yourself where you might be holding onto a belief that you are the one who’ve got to do it. My husband definitely doesn’t iron as well as I do. I, I, I have to say. But if chef comes to poor, if I need extra time, I would be happy to say. Listen, Abby, you’ll have to iron your shirt yourself because I will need those 15 minutes to do X, Y, and Z because.

Ironing can be done by someone else. It does not have to be me. And like that, there’s many things in your day where you might be doing things because it’s been you all the time or in your business or at work you might be holding on to task because you think someone else might not do as good of a job as you are doing.

Okay, so just bear this in mind when you make adjustments and then it is always a good idea to revisit a time audit a few months down the line, maybe in the beginning when you, when you’re readjusting, do it quarterly to see how does it compare? What does this pie chart look like now? Or your buckets distributed a little bit more evenly or  in the way that feels good to you, or at least.

You know when you’re seasoned in this, at least once a year, do a time audit and really make it visible for you. Where is your time going? Okay, so the point of a time audit is that we want to reclaim some of our time, 

and this is what peaceful productivity is about. I have the Peace framework and that really helps us to get things done, be supported, and feel. Aligned and joyful in the process because I want everybody to let go of this idea that productivity means busyness, that we’ve got to be doing and doing and doing to be productive.

In fact, one of the most productive things you can do is buying back your time. So delegating, outsourcing. Eliminating. That’s not so much of a transaction in terms of buying. But yeah, automating. Automating is another thing. So I just wanna quickly take a couple of minutes and speak about this fact  like I mentioned, that it’s not just you who can do things.

We’ve got to look at our time in terms of how high value and low value and bringing it back to entrepreneurship. We know what an ROI is. We know what the return on investment is on our money, but do we know what the ROI is on our time and energy? I think most people don’t know that or don’t look at it that way, and so I wanna invite you to take the audit a step further and attach an energy to everything.

In your audit to everything that you do think about, how do you feel when you do this task? Do you feel energized? Do you feel joyful, happy, or do you feel drained and  resentful that you’ve got to do this thing? So when you have done this time audit and you’ve, you know, listed it all up. Go in and color code it.

Maybe good energy is green, not so good. Energy is red. And just really look at it from that energy point of view and identify what are your biggest energy drainers. And those energy drainers are the things that you really should consider to either delegate, automate, or eliminate. Like for me, it’s. Paying bills.

I love to have that automated. Um, if you can have groceries delivered to your house so that you don’t have to go out and do that, you know, trip and you can hire help in the home or in the at work in your business, you can ask your family to pitch in. So you’re delegating things that are not tasks that make you joyful and happy, and you can eliminate things because oftentimes we do things.

Out of obligation, or like I said, we’ve always done it that way, so we’ve just gonna continue. Well, it’s time to look at it and it’s time to question it. And if it is not providing value, if it is not moving the needle and it can’t be automated or it can’t be delegated, it is probably time to eliminate it.

So yeah, automate, delegate, eliminate all these things that make you feel like they’re sucking your energy. And  with the time audit, with readjusting things, with identifying what is low value and high value, and really thinking about your time and energy as something that has an ROI attached to it, you can easily get back one to two hours per day, five to 10 hours per week.

And what could you do with that time? If you had one hour a day, how much more rest can you get in? How much more quality time with your family can you spend? How many more creative projects or self-care moments or, I don’t know what, whatever it could be for a run. I’m currently training for my  half marathon, so if I have an hour extra in a day, I could do a very nice run.

On almost daily basis, which is perfect for my training. So yes, what could we do with the extra time? And that should be things that give us energy and that feel joyful. So again, I’ve got a PDF that goes through the time audit, step by step, including a little video that explains how to use the app toggle, which I like to track my time digitally.

It’s like a clock that runs in the background and it tracks your time and you can write in there what you’ve been doing and you can download a report and it makes a beautiful pie chart for you. So it’s quite cool if you’re someone like me who likes things in a digital way and visually. But again, a simple Excel sheet or even a paper sheet is  absolutely enough to do a time audit.

So yeah, download that PDF in on my website. The link will be in the show note. It’s the time audit guide and I hope you enjoyed this episode, and I hope you join me in doing a time audit, even if it’s not sexy, and even if it might feel like just another thing to do, the outcome of. Potentially freeing one to two hours per day.

Five to 10 hours per week is huge. This is time that you can spend on things that you love. This is the time that you feel you don’t have right now, but you can create it by intentionally making your time visible and then adjusting it and making tweaks, and really looking at it from the lens of return on investment on your time.

So you are in control of your time, and I would love for you to make. The minutes and hours count in your day, and I know once you’ve done the time audit and you have claimed back time, it will help you to be more peacefully productive. And with that, I can’t wait to see you next week. Come back for another episode, and until then, stay peacefully productive.