How are you spending your time?

Is it on what really matters? Let’s do a Time Audit!

I’ve been struggling lately with the balance of parenting, work, and life. Even on the best days, parenting has been a pretty all-hands-on-deck endeavor of late. Our 19-month-old was described by her teacher as “everything, everywhere, all at once,” and goodness, isn’t that true? She is SO FUN and also, I am exhausted all the time. 

I simply don’t have much bandwidth for work and other parts of life. I know that. I know that I am in a full-on season of parenting and that it won’t last forever. My little family is also incredibly important to me. My full-on job as parent is the most important thing right now! And, at the same time, I’m beating myself up for not “getting more done” in other areas. 

I’m underslept but frustrated that I’m skipping my early morning workouts. I’m eating weird food at odd hours – fueling my body to function while underslept and continuing to nurse my toddler – and annoyed at myself for the lack of a well-executed dinner meal plan each week. I have a list of writing projects I want to tackle but just do not have the mental capacity or TIME and I’m blaming myself for that. Why can’t I prioritize this stuff more? 

Last week, just as I had logged into a very important work meeting, school called. Our wild woman had fallen on the playground – could we come pick her up? 

Within two minutes, I had cancelled or rescheduled all of my meetings and deadlines for the afternoon (which was full of them) and gotten in the car. It was the easiest decision I’ve perhaps ever made – of course, my daughter is more important than all of those very important things. 

But what if she hadn’t been injured? Would I have said and done the same? Would my actions have matched the words I wrote above? That parenting is my most important thing right now? 

How do we allocate our time and energy when urgency isn’t forcing our hands? 

If you, like me, get to the end of the day and nearly collapse with exhaustion thinking, “what did I even do today?!” then let’s do a time audit!

If you were around last year, you’ll remember how much I loved Laura Vanderkam’s book, I Know How She Does It, which is basically a compilation of time audits — a window into how successful women spend their weeks. 

I absolutely LOVE getting a window into other people’s real lives and the messy logistics of actually living them. But it’s hard to scrutinize myself in the same critical way. Especially when things pile up, I just start operating in a haphazard sort of way that loses sight of how I want to live and what I want to prioritize.

Maybe you do that, too? 

Enter the time audit. What is it? A time audit is the practice of tracking all of your time; writing down the activities you do all day, every day for a certain amount of time (I recommend a week).

By meticulously tracking what I do all day, every day, I can look back on the week, tease apart patterns, and identify chunks of time I’d like to use differently. Before we can make changes, we have to gather data about our current status quo. 

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My Time Audit

I first did this myself a few years ago when I was working part-time and still feeling overworked – what was the problem? 

soooooooo much multitasking

Two major takeaways from this exercise back then: 

• I never built intentional time into the day to walk the dog — something I did 2x a day, every day. It often took almost two hours of my time each day — two hours I hadn’t budgeted!

• Without a structured, full-time work schedule dictated to me by someone else, I was working in fits and starts, without many meaningful blocks of time to complete deep-thinking work. 

These were MAJOR patterns that were easy to see when I looked at my time laid out in this simple format but eluded me as I was living out each day. Once I understood these and other patterns, I was able to make intentional shifts so my days felt more easeful and productive (but the nourishing, good kind of productive). 

Especially as we’re careening toward the always-hectic end of the year, I challenge you to assess your current status quo alongside me. I’ll be doing a time audit myself next week, and a few weeks after that, I’ll share how I’m going to use my own data. Won’t you join me?

Need a tool to get started? Use my Time Audit Template! 

Stay tuned for what comes next. ✨

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Do you want support tracking and reviewing your Time Audit Data? I'm opening 1:1 coaching in 2025 and would love to work with you! Be the first to know when I launch.

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Hi, I’m Liz! Thanks for being here and reading my journals on the journey. If you’re new, learn a bit more about me and this space here and here, and consider subscribing to my weeklyish posts.

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