Time & Energy Review (Google Sheets)

Actually understand where your time & energy is going.

I wrote more on this here: Time Management 1.0 - Time & Energy Reviews.

Peter Drucker famously said a lot of ish. Two things he said summarize well the importance of managing time.

If you can't measure it, you can't manage it.

Time is the scarcest resource, and unless it is managed, nothing else can be managed.

A quick case study for knowledge workers (that's you!).

• Friend: "Hey, would you consider yourself productive and good with time?"
• Knowledge Worker: "Oh, hell yea. I've got a to do list. Plus my manager loves me."
• Friend: "Have you ever actually audited how you spend your time?"
• Knowledge Worker: "No, actually, I haven't. But I know I'm spending time on the right things."
• Friend: "Cool. Use this template and give me a call back in two weeks"
• 2 weeks later...
• Knowledge Worker: "Wow, I've really been pissing the bed. Turns out I spend 50% of my time in meetings, 20% on communicating with my team, 20% on draining admin work and only 10% on my top goal. No wonder I'm off-track to hit my top-goal by the end of the quarter."

The reality is that most knowledge workers don't understand how they're spending their time. They don't measure it and therefore can't manage it. Get your act together with this free template which you can edit or improve and it will put you in position to:

1. Kill unnecessary non-mission critical work/meetings.
2. Delegate as much as you can. If someone can do it as good or better - send it!
3. Double-down on high leverage, high priority and high energy work.

Run this quarterly or as needed when drained or unproductive.