Well, I’ve done a few things to counter-act this potential downside of the work-at-home lifestyle. First,  I’ve created a “work zone” for myself that is completely separated from the rest of the non-work home. I did this by finishing a basement that was unused. You’ll see a post or two about that coming up soon for those who want to learn how to really mold/waterproof a basement to make it work.

Another thing you can do is make your work environment really be a work environment. Don’t have clothes hanging around that need to be washed, or toys that need to be put away. Make the work environment one in which you can be productive and one that shouts “work” rather than “play” and you’ll be tempted to make your time efficient… not the opposite.

To do that, I’ve invested in some good quality office furniture. My source of choice is Henriksen Butler office furniture. This Utah office furniture design and supply house has some really interesting and work-productive furniture that will really help you make that work/life balance effective.

They even offer to help design effective workspaces for the design-challenged:

Henriksen/Butler brings a unique blend of knowledge and technology to solve workplace challenges for business. Whether you have one location or one hundred, we can help create workplace environments that solve problems and boost productivity. The technology we use helps — from initial design through procurement and well beyond installation. We can manage any and all aspects of your workspace transition to ensure everything goes smoothly. From space planning and design to installation, maintenance and on-going support, Henriksen/Butler is creating great places to work, learn and heal.

On their website, you can see office furniture examples and the sort of interior design work they do. The company has multiple locations, mostly in the Southwest / Rocky region, providing solutions for those looking for Nevada office furniture and locations in Las Vegas, Salt Lake City, St. Geroge, and Boise, Idaho.

And for companies larger than one, they setup cubicles, chairs, desks, meeting rooms, counters, etc. for medium to large corporations.

I’d love to see what sort of work environments you FHWW’ers have set up. Anyone want to share some photo galleries?

How to know what time it is when you don’t even know where you are.

Following up on the previous post on efficiency, I just want to point one other item out. I travel a lot. I mean a LOT. At one point, it was cheaper and easier just to fly around the world for 4 weeks straight than to return home between trips. I have to say, this is one area that the 4HWW doesn’t have quite figured out. How can you get to four hours a week when the plane flight itself (for business, mind you) is 12 hours long? Go figure.

One of the tools that I use while I’m traveling is the website at Weather and time. It’s often that I don’t know what time it is in my own city, but to know what it is when you are traveling is tough. Even more important is to know the time difference so that when you set up a call, with say, India, you realize that it’s 10 and a HALF hours ahead of the East Coast of the US. That’s right — it’s off by a half-hour increment. Some countries adjust their time zone up by 45 or 15 minute increments. Who came up with that?

Anyways, the website I mentioned above allows you to check not only the time and date, but also the weather in the some of the most important cities of the world. They have a particular fixation with Spain, and you can see all the time and date in all Spanish cities. But even better, when you get that information, you can print it so it appears on just one page. Slip it into your itinerary, and off you go.

Just make sure to miss the monsoon season in Mumbai. It ain’t pretty for us east coast US folks. Any other good tools or tips for the world traveler (or even for those that spend their time talking on the phone to other time zones)?

Like many of you, I struggle to get things done on time that I really need to get done. I get bogged down in the grunt work when I should be focusing on the bigger picture items. You know the drill, focus on the important but not urgent, but all the while the urgent things eat up your time. If you did a Time Audit, you’d find that much of the time is being taken up by short-term activities that can easily be reduced, eliminated, or outsourced. Yet they stay on your to-do list anyways.

Why is that? I believe it’s because of the psychology of delegation. Anyone who has been doing something for a while believes that they can do a task faster, better, and less expensively than a third party. And in many ways this is absolutely correct. I have found, through my own experience, that I can perform better in at least two out of the three criteria (faster, better, cheaper) than anyone else I can get to do the task. But that is NOT the point!

If a task can be outsourced, it can be defined. If it can be defined, it can be measured. If it can be measured, you can figure out what things need to be learned to do it well. That means by definition anyone who has the time or talent to do the task can do the task. Including yourself. When you do it yourself, you are keenly aware of the requirements and the specifications for doing the job, so you can say that you’re being 100% efficient with regards to requirements-to-implementation, whereas a third-party can be very requirements-efficient, but never as requirements-efficient as the person who is in control of the requirements (that’s you). In that way, you feel that you can do it “better” than a third-party.

Likewise, outsourcing comes at a cost. Your cost is your cost of time, whereas the outsourcer’s cost is the cost of labor. Now, Tim would say that your time-cost is greater than your outsource-cost, and that’s absolutely correct. However, what’s not factored into the equation is the problem of free cash flow. Many startups and muse-focused entrepreneurs simply don’t have the free cash to hire an outsourcer. So even though the time-cost is more than the labor-cost, the cash requirements for labor-cost are higher (cash is tighter than time), so in that case you feel that you can do it “cheaper” than a third-party.

And finally, outsourcing comes at a time-efficiency cost. Just as the person who knows the requirements will be the most able to translate those requirements into reality, that person will be able to execute on it the fastest. It simply takes time to manage a third-party, check on their quality, and then integrate the results with everything else going on in the business. In this manner, because of all those time inefficiencies, if you do it yourself, you feel that you can do it “faster” than a third-party.

Let’s deflate the Better, Faster, Cheaper Bubble

The most successful companies are the ones that most effectively delegate tasks in the most economically-efficient manner while minimizing the inefficiencies inherent in delegation. Of all the constraints imposed on the business (financial, market, competition, and time), the most inflexible is time. You can remove financial constraints by borrowing, selling other products or services, selling parts of the business, or other means. You can remove market constraints by finding new products to sell, and/or focusing the business on specific niches where you are more competitive. But you can only remove time constraints by finding other people to do the work. Simply put, as the business grows larger, the time constraint issue becomes primary. All other problems can easily be solved if you can effectively and efficiently manage time.

In this way, the key to getting more out of your time and multiplying the money-return of time is to multiply the amount of time available. Perhaps for my later academic career as a business school professor, I could actually come up with an equation called the “Money-return of Time” that somehow calculates how to optimize the use of time for best revenue potential, but that’s for later. I think we all know that the best way to get more from your time is to multiply the amount of time you have to get things done and remove the inefficient activities from your time consumption. Both of these things: multiplying available time and increasing time quality requires outsourcing.

Effective outsourcing therefore means being keenly aware of the potential inefficiencies of time, quality, and cost inherent in outsourcing and coming up with a strategy to mitigate those inefficiencies. Therefore, it is not about whether to outsource, but rather how and when.

Introducing Microsourcing…

To help figure out how to outsource effectively while minimizing the time, cost, and quality inefficiencies, I’m going to introduce in my next blog post the concept of microsourcing. Simply put, microsourcing is an outsourcing strategy that focuses on chopping a task into more fine-grained tasks until you’ve reached a point of optimum, delegating that task to be performed within 24 hours, then quickly ascertaining the quality of that work, and quickly integrating that work with the rest of the activities. Doing so allows you to minimize cost, time, and quality inefficiencies and keep you focused on important, non-urgent items. Stay tuned, and we’ll explore this topic in greater detail together.

Rather than summarize what I believe is an excellent post, I encourage you all to read it. And then think, how can this be applied to the 4HWW? Clearly, Tim Ferriss shares the opinion that nothing is truly urgent. And if it is, just outsource it.

I read a fantastic post by Jed @ the Newly Rich called “Our 4HWW Workflow, Part I“. Without stealing his thunder (and idea), I encourage you to take a look at the post that diagrams a ludicrously simple, but very effective way of looking at your tasks.

Here’s a quick thumbnail of the flow. Click on it to view it at the original post location:

Thanks, Jed!

I got a good comment yesterday from Jennifer @ LifeMuncher in response to yesterday’s post on more effective time management. Rather than reply as a comment (and leave it buried for everyone to find), I though it would make a good follow up post.

The question simply was: “What were some concrete examples of things that you’ve eliminated to get from 60+ hours to 20?”. The answer, in my case, pretty basic, but perhaps has to do with my specific work style, activities and business. But, here’s the details.

A case of Time ADHD

After I did my Time Audit, I found that my default work pattern / behavior was to work on tasks as they rose to the top of my pile or my “top of mind”. Basically, I was constantly putting out fires and shifting from one task to another. Ironically, by dealing with tasks this way, nothing ever got done. I spent more time just trying to get into one task and getting situated to be able to perform the work than actually doing the work. It was like a Work Buffet… all the work laid out in front of me like 400 food items at a buffet, with no specific time set up for breakfast, lunch, or dinner. I would just graze all day on work items until they got done, but at the end of the day, I would realize, “wow, did I really eat that much??”

Same goes for that style of work management. If you just deal with work items as a bunch of stuff and “graze” from one activity to another, you’ll realize at the end of the day that very little got done and, “wow, did I really waste that much time??”

So, when I finished my Time Audit, I realized that I easily wasted at least 20 hours in the week (that’s 4-5 hours a day) starting tasks that never got finished. If I can just focus on one task at a time and work on it until completion, then I have a chance of making that happen.

Forced Prioritization

Once I forced myself to put tasks on a spreadsheet, declare how long I think they should take, and then force myself to complete them within that time (or realize that I underestimated the time allotment), then things started to take shape. The first realization was that I had to prioritize tasks. Focus on the important, urgent tasks that had to get done. And then get them done in the most time-efficient manner. But, wait, did I really have to get that task done myself? I found that about 20-30% of my tasks I shouldn’t be doing at all. Whether it’s handling some customer situation or posting something online or writing up some document, if I had to put it in my spreadsheet and assign some time allotment, I got an opportunity to rethink things. Maybe I’ll give them to one of my work colleagues. Or maybe I’ll just not do it at all and see what happens. Or perhaps I’ll combine it with some other task and hope that it suffices.

Furthermore, being a perfectionist in this scenario does not help at all. The important thing is to get things done. Yes, things have to be done satisfactorily (in the eyes of the beholder), but that does not mean perfectly. The difference between Getting Things Done and Getting Things Done Perfectly is huge. The combination of Forced Prioritization, Getting things Off the Stack, and Focusing on Getting Things Done (Good Enough) really squeezed another 10 hours out of the week.

Distractions Be Gone

So, where did the remaining 10 hours of time gain come from? Because I switched so much from task to task, I found myself getting easily distracted. And not always by work activities. Sometimes personal things would get on top of my pile, or I’d be distracted by some website or thing going on in the world that I wanted to find out more about. By forcing me to the interruption free when I completed my tasks, the distractions were gone. Ironically, this meant that I had more time to pay attention to those things. Who’d a thunk it?

Time Gain and Weight Loss

Perhaps my time gain is a result of how inefficient and ineffective my existing usage of time was. Because I was so ineffective, perhaps any move to efficiency would have resulted in significant time gain. Think of it like weight loss. If you aren’t exercising and eating crap all day, then simply getting your ass out of the chair and moving and stop eating those Twinkies (not that I do that!) will result in significant weight loss. At some point, the weight loss will plateau and then you’ll have to address the underlying things that cause weight gain. But until then, doing anything will shed those extra wasteful pounds.

So, think of time gain like weight loss. Perhaps you have some extra time loss “fat” that comes from being inefficient, juggling things around, constantly focusing on what’s in front of you instead of what needs to get done, trying to do everything (perfectly) instead of trying to only do the important things as well as needs to be done. If you are as inefficient as I was, that will get you at least a 50% time gain.

However, if you are already quite efficient (lean and mean) and have somehow managed to pack your day with efficient use of time, perhaps your mileage may vary. In fact, I’m sure it will. Now that I’m down to 20 hours a week, it’s going to take a much harder effort to get down farther. I’ve reached my time gain plateau, or at least, I can make incremental improvements, but none of which will be as effective as my first. I’ll share with you all how I can break through the second time gain glass ceiling.

What are your experiences?

In a few past posts, I mentioned that my primary task towards achieving the goals of the Four Hour Work Week is to reduce my 60+ hour work week down to 20. As evidenced by my recent trip to Denmark and Sweden, I was able to successfully do so. Of course, the big question is “how”?

First, in order to reduce your total work week, you have to find out where the time is going. Using a combination of my Time Audit Spreadsheet and the Personal Task Manager (PTM) application, I realized that much of my time was going towards tasks that could easily be eliminated, trimmed, or outsourced. I resolved that I would at that point force myself to focus on my “day job” from 9AM to 1PM only, freeing up the rest of the time for my new muse and new-business tasks.

You can download the old Time Audit Spreadsheet here, and below is a screen shot of the PTM tool in action.

Now, the PTM tool has its pluses and minuses. In particular, the tool provides a good summary overview of how you are spending your day, but it really is not an effective time management tool by itself. In fact, outside of doing a one-time (or periodic) time audit, I don’t think it is an effective tool at all in managing your time. However, that said, here’s some tips on getting the most value out of it:

• Set up a Hierarchy of Time Categories: The tool simply asks “What are you doing now?”. You can input anything you want at that point, but I found coming up with a good hierarchy of tasks that were lumped by category provided the most meaningful data. For example, high level categories like “Personal”, “Day Job”, “Muse”, “Extra-Curricular Activities”, etc was good for the top-level with a increasing level of detail for lower levels.
• Reporting at the Summary Level: PTM is good for summarizing how you are spending your time based on the categories you set up, but it can’t tell you how much one project or activity from one category compares against another in the same category. As such, it really is only good for summary-level detail. You’d have to set up a category for each project you are working on if you want to track at that level. At which point, I think it’s too much work for the returns
• Time Budgeting: This is the area where I felt PTM sorely lacked. For a Time Auditing tool aimed at helping you figure out where the time is going, PTM is adequate. But for a Time Management tool, you really want something that will help you set up a time “budget” and then manage against it. That’s where I turned to something more basic… a simply to-do spreadsheet and a kitchen timer.

Simple Planning: The Covey Quadrant Task List

Once I figured out where the time was going, I could craft a more pointed Time Budget / Daily Task list that would get me closer to the 4HWW and maybe GTD ideals. Based on Covey’s Quadrants, I came up with the following, more optimized Time Tracking Spreadsheet:

As you can see, there are 4 quadrants in the Time Planning Spreadsheet. The Top Left is the “Stress Quadrant”, so the key is to clear these tasks off first and quickly. Put all your unavoidable “frogs” here and then quickly clear through them by setting a time constraint on each task. I put the number of minutes for each task.

The quadrant to the right of that, in green, is the “Value Quadrant”. These are the things that deserve time and are the things you’re freeing up your time to spend on. Some of these may be work tasks, but hopefully (as in my case), the work tasks go to the Stress Quadrant, and as I execute on them quickly, I can focus on Value Quadrant tasks.

The Bottom Left quadrant is the “Deception Quadrant”. Somehow these ended up on my To-Do list, and I have to get them off as quickly as possible. If it’s worth delegating it to someone else, do it. Otherwise, just dump it. (Both fall under the category of “elimination”.) If it can’t be delegated and it can’t be dumped, find a way to automate it. In any case, outsourcing these tasks are NOT a good idea because they should probably not be done by anyone at all. If outsourcing equals the cost and complexity of automation, great, then do it. But don’t outsource something that shouldn’t be done at all. Sound familiar? Tim Ferriss says the same in his book.

The Bottom Right quadrant is the “Regret Quadrant”, or I should put the “Instant Death Quadrant”. A task should never end up here because it simply should not be done. Period. So, this area is greyed out. If someone asks you to do something or somehow you get foisted a task that is neither important nor critical, just say no. Period. No.

Putting it into practice

So, how does ths work? Well, I start with the tasks in the Stress Quadrant. Eat those frogs, get them done. To do that, I start each task by setting a kitchen timer on my desk with the number of minutes I have given myself for that task. That’s it. As the clock ticks (oh, and I can hear it ticking!) I run through the task and get it done before the bell rings (or the buzzer sounds). If it sounds, and I’m not done, I lost. Time to tweak. If I get the task done before the bell rings, I win! Take a quick break, and then onto the next task. Get all the tasks done by 1PM or earlier and then focus on the Value Quadrant tasks.

Here’s the timer that I use, if you’re curious. I got it off Amazon:

So, that’s all there is to it. I can’t say this is trivial or simple. But if you follow the steps of Audit. Time Management. Trim / Automate / Eliminate / Outsource. Repeat. I think you will find yourself getting closer to eliminating a significant part of your work day.

Now, to use the other techniques in 4HWW to get even closer to the 4 Hour a Week goal… and build up my personal revenue in the process.

Download Time Tracking Spreadsheet Here

Inspired by both the principles of time management and The 4-Hour Workweek, I had developed the Life Management Matrix. This matrix classifies the activities we perform into four categories which I will summarize here:

1. The Quadrant of Transformation: Essential and unforgettable activities that have to get done and will make an immensely positive impact on your life.
2. The Quadrant of Automation: Essential but forgettable activities that need to get done, but will not really have an impact on your life. These are things like changing the oil in your car or renewing your driver’s license.
3. The Quadrant of Fun: Unessential but unforgettable activities that don’t need to get done, but which may provide a great deal of fun or lasting memories.
4. The Quadrant of Elimination: Unessential and forgettable activities for which no one is depending on you, and that do not impact your health or happiness.

As I have noted before in a post on rethinking time management, this looks a lot like the Time Management Matrix in Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. An entertaining description of Covey’s time management matrix can be found in this sketchcast on Using The Eisenhower Matrix.

So you could think of the Life Management Matrix as a recast of Covey’s time management matrix, done in a way to facilitate the application of the principles set forth in The 4-Hour Workweek. Be recasting, we can identify opportunities for eliminating and automating activities – necessary ingredients on a quest towards becoming on of the so-called Newly Rich. Instead of importance and urgency, we classify based on what is important outwardly to ourselves and others (essential) and what is truly important inwardly to ourselves (unforgettable). I just think the concept of importance needs to be expanded into these two dimensions to help us totally capture the holistic nature of what it means for something to be important. At the same time, while I think the concept of urgency is real, to me it just means where something essential will fall on the calendar.

All of this leads some major conclusions:

• Unessential activities do not really need to be scheduled and therefore can be eliminated from any time management system.
• Essential activities that have little inward importance (i.e. they are forgettable) should be looked at as opportunities for automation, outsourcing, process improvement, etc.
• Ideally, you can spend most of your time on what is important to you outwardly and inwardly, whether urgent or not.

One could therefore go through all the things they do, and classify these activities according to this scheme, allowing things that can be eliminated, ignored and automated to show themselves. However, while the model is somewhat static, what is important to us is not. Importance is a dynamic quality. What is important to us inwardly and outwardly changes over time. Let’s consider a couple of examples:

Example 1: Laundry. I would usually place this activity in the unessential and forgettable quadrant for rather obvious reasons. It is pretty unimportant. However, what if we are wearing our last items of clean clothes? Laundry becomes important! I think you would agree that laundry becomes essential, but remains forgettable. So at times laundry can be eliminated, but sometimes is cannot and becomes a category for automation. Solution: get a laundry service and schedule it when you are down to your last items of clean clothes!

Example 2: A Serious Hobby. At one time I played music semi-professionally. I loved playing in a band. Playing and performing music was definitely essential (I earned a living from it) and also unforgettable (I loved it!). Over the years, I gave up playing in a band and started working in the software industry. I got married and had children. I still love to play music, but it is hardly essential anymore. When I teach my kids how to play something or just sing some songs with them it is a truly unforgettable experience. So in time, music has moved from the quadrant of transformation to the quadrant of fun.

I hope these examples show how important it is to realize that how we classify activities (in really any time management system) can, and usually do, evolve over time. This fundamental component of life and time management is dynamic. Practically speaking, it probably means you should audit how you spend your time on a regular basis, for example, perhaps this is something you might do once a year. Remember: Change is inevitable – except from a vending machine. (Robert C. Gallagher)

First, I optimized the Time Audit spreadsheet. Thanks to Hilarycat for some good contributions. I’ve attached it below:

Time Tracking Spreadsheet 1.1

Big Changes:

• I tried to use Brick’s Life Management Matrix(“Essential & Unforgetable”), but it simply did not work for me. I found that focusing each task on a Dreamline tasks, or if not, realizing that the task does not contribute to dreamline activity, was sufficient to realize that goal. However, Covey’s quadrants were still very helpful. Indeed, one should organize one’s day to do Important, Urgent tasks first (without distraction) and then move to Important, Not-Urgent tasks as quickly as possible skipping unimportant, non-urgent tasks and outsourcing or automating unimportant, urgent tasks
• Metrics and measurement. Simply recording tasks doesn’t accomplish the task of the time audit. What’s required is to look at trends. One week is probably enough to see beginning of trends, but probably it takes two weeks to really and fully see the trends. So, I have now another worksheet in the spreadsheet that tracks the ongoing tasks and allows you to pinpoint the time wasters and your 80/20 important tasks
• After listening to the wonderful YouTube videos shown on Brick’s Life Sutra blog, I realized that tasks should not only be listed, but you need to determine WHY you are doing those tasks and what happens if you don’t do that. If you can’t answer those questions, then don’t do them!
• Also, I added some columns to evaluate whether the task was an 80/20 task (that is, it occupied 20% of the time, but had 80% of the results), as well as added “Trim” to the set of next steps. This means that I should do this task if it appears again, but focus on reducing the time allocation.

The first thing to realize is that there’s three parts to effecitve Time Auditing:

• Determining the tasks to be accomplished and planned time allotment
• Faithfully recording actual execution time and noting any interruptions.
• Recording the history of all such tasks for later analysis

It’s really the second bullet that we’re after for this audit. Spending time on time recording is just a means to an end, so it should be done as effectively and efficiently as possible. But simply recording time is not enough. One has to first have a plan for how that time will be spent, and then, an audit of how the actuals vs. the planned result. Think of it like a budget. First, plan your budget, then measure your spending, then determine the variances, using that to determine how to alter your actual spending or the planned budget.

So, what were the lessons learned? In my case:

• Time auditing really doesn’t take that much time. I spend 4 minutes in the morning setting my list of tasks and defining when I would like to accomplish them. I then spend less than 20 seconds after each task indicating how much it actually took and then moving it to the Cumulative Time spreadsheet.
• I spend too much time task switching. Focus, focus, focus on one task and one task only and do it to completion without being interrupted. Which leads me to…
• Too many interruptions! Phone, email, and high-urgency task seem to be time distractors. When something is urgent, switching from one task to another simply invites more urgent tasks, distracting you from big-picture tasks.
• I must have ADD, because I can’t seem to be able to effectively focus on something without something else popping into my head demanding my attention or I get mentally exhausted and need a break. I think the 10-2*5 approach might work to combat that. Take tasks 10 minutes at a time. Then, take a 2 minute break at the end of each period, repeating 5 times and then taking a longer break afterwards. I use an egg timer now to time my tasks. We’ll see if this helps.
• Eat the frog! There’s always a task (or two or three) that seem to appear on the to-do list, but never get done. Why? Because they keep being postponed. The only way to counteract that is to do those tasks FIRST. That’s called “eating the frog” because when confronted with a bunch of things to eat, one of which is a frog, that just keeps getting put off. But if you eat the frog first, everything else can only be that much better. So eat the frog!
• Be more specific with your tasks! A vague task never seems to get done or even be done at all. Be specific to the point of micromanagement. If you want to make sales, don’t just have a task called “Make Sales” cause it will never get done and always appear. Instead, you should have a task called “Email the first 50 contacts on A spreadsheet and pitch B service”. Then, this can get done. Indeed, “Make Sales” is not a task, but a category. The more specific activity is the task in this category.
• Keep your email clean!!! Shoot for the Zero Inbox. You should not use your inbox as a to-do list. You should keep it clean at the end of the day since that will indicate tasks accomplished. If you need a task to be done, move the email to a to-do inbox, but then list the to-do in your daily tasks for that day or the next. Don’t create more frogs! This does force you to read and respond to email in batches. But you already know that if you read the Four-Hour Work Week.

Hilarycat had some other differences of thought on this spreadsheet, as follows:

Your Task and my Account are not actually the same. Account is what account you’re working on (literally). “The Jefferson account” vs. “Send out promos.” One’s a verb, the other’s a proper noun You can easily aggregate what you did for a given Account if you’re listing Account… and that way draw conclusions like “Wow, the Jefferson account is a huge time sink and makes little money – I should quit working with them” that you can’t do with entries like “send out promos” or “register domain name.”

Likewise, your Category is not the same as my Functions. Yours are vague – Core Business, Personal, Muse… Mine are highly specific business functions – Marketing, Coding, Writing, Research, Communications. Again… how does it serve you to analyze time spent on Core Business vs. Muse when you’re really trying to figure out what you can eliminate and outsource? Whereas if you’re tracking by function, you can realize, “Oh, I spend 4 hours a day writing emails… I guess it really is time to implement Tim’s communications obstacle course.”

I’m going to try to transition now from my do-it-yourself spreadsheet to the Personal Time Manager utility suggested by Brick and Hilarycat. If I can get the auditing part done without interfering with planning (you still have to define your daily to-do list), then I think this can work. I’ll get back to you with my results on that shortly.

But that’s missing the point a bit about why I’m doing this (and why I have a feeling other 4HWWs are also trying to audit their time). I’m trying to find out where I’m losing my time. I am nowhere near my 4HWW time goals, and in part that’s because I’m running around doing so many tasks that at the end the day, I wonder where all the time went. The 4HWW Time Audit tool is not meant to be something to be used if you are already time efficient, nor is it meant to be an operational tool… it is a diagnostic / auditing tool only.

The point is that I’m still working 12+ hour days and not getting any closer to my 4HWW goal. Part of the problem is that I’m already doing too much… I’m already task switching, so I’m not making the problem any worse by doing some analysis. Just like a doctor needs to do some tests, perform some scans, or do some blood work to figure out what’s ailing the patient, I need some analysis to figure out what’s ailing my time. The bloodwork / tests aren’t meant to solve the problem — they are purely diagnostic. Similarly, the 4HWW Time Audit is not meant to govern the way you spend your time, but rather audit the way you have been spending it. Once that has been identified enough to determine the patterns and trends… toss the 4hWW audit tool! It’s time to Eliminate, Automate, Outsource, and Repeat.

This is an analysis tool, not a management tool. If you already know where your time is going, then don’t use this sheet! This sheet won’t help you, and in fact, it will be a hindrance For those who are already cramming a hundred tasks into a single day, this 4HWW Time Audit sheet aims to find out what tasks are the time-wasters, which tasks are the ones to accentuate. This is purely an analysis tool, not a tool for running something once you’ve already achieved the efficiency point.

In any case, the question was how much time to spend on this worksheet. The answer: as little as possible. I spent 2 minutes on this spreadsheet first thing this morning assigning tasks and allocating time, and then 30 seconds on this spreadsheet after each task recording how much time it took. No more time than that. No need to put “work on the spreadsheet” in the spreadsheet. I had 10 tasks total for the day. I think 5 minutes aggregate invested in determining my time wasters goes a long way to getting me to 4 hours a day!

Thoughts? Do you agree? Disagree?

Make sense?