1: “I feel like I’m letting the team down,” Miranda said.
Miranda, a superstar team member, was sitting across from her boss, entrepreneur Dan Martell, for their weekly one-on-one.
She “admitted she felt overwhelmed after a recent promotion to team leader,” Dan writes in his book Buy Back Your Time. “She went from specialist to managing more people than anyone else in our company,”
Miranda told him: “I’m supposed to review every employee on my team, manage their calls, conduct one-on-ones, and update reports. My head’s spinning.”
Dan “offered a Kleenex, some compassion, and a plan,” he writes.
“I told her the same thing I tell all my coaching clients,” he recalls. “That if we could audit her time and find what tasks were sucking all her time and energy, we could then transfer those tasks to someone else. That would help her fill her time with what was most important to her role.”
Dan had a specific recommendation for Miranda: “Audit your time by writing down what your are doing every fifteen minutes, every day, for the next two weeks.”
They agreed to meet again afterward.
Just four days later, Dan received this text from Miranda: “Dan, I figured it out. Thanks so much!”
“In just four days,” he writes, “Miranda was able to see exactly what low-value tasks were sucking her time and energy.”
2: While time audits are not necessarily new, Dan adds an extra ingredient to supercharge the process.
“I call mine a Time and Energy Audit because not only will it help you find out where your time is going, it will also help you see where your energy is going,” he explains.
He shares the story of his uber-successful CEO friend Dana, who wouldn’t listen to Dan’s advice. “I told him to hire an administrative assistant and stop checking his email,” Dan writes. He “just couldn’t do it.”
Dana knew Dan’s argument was “logical,” but somehow, he wasn’t able to turn his email over to someone else.
“Do you know what finally got him to transfer his inbox?” Dan asks.
“He started thinking about the energy related to each task,” Dan shares. “Does this task (email) stress me out more than other tasks? When he asked himself that question, the game changed from saving his time and money to saving his energy. He stopped checking his own email, hired an assistant, and went so far as to delete all his email applications on his smartphone. He literally can’t check his email, even if he wanted to.”
Here are the four steps we can take to perform Dan’s “Time and Energy Audit:”
Step 1: Determine our Buyback Rate. We take the amount our company pays us, divide it by two thousand, and then divide the result by four. This equation tells us our hourly wage.
Step 2: Audit our workday in fifteen-minute increments for two weeks. Our goal is to document every quarter-hour of our time. Here’s an example:
8:00–8:30 Emailed clients.
8:30–9:30 Conducted a podcast interview.
9:30–11:00 Met with Board of Directors.
11:00–11:15 Had a one-on-one with Kelsey.
11:15–11:30 Had a one-on-one with Zack.
“Two full weeks is the optimal amount of time,” Dan writes, “so that one-off travel plans or interruptions don’t throw off our audit.”
Step 3: Assign each activity a value of one to four dollar signs. “At the end of our time audit, go back to our list and write down one to four dollar signs next to each task,” Dan suggests. “Think Google’s restaurant pricing ranges, where each added dollar sign signals an increase in price. This will be specific to our situation. For example, we may determine that one dollar sign for you will be everything that’s a $10-per-hour task, while four dollar signs denote tasks worth over $500 per hour.”
Step 4: Highlight each task in red or green. “Once we’ve collected a two-week swath of data and marked everything with one to four dollar signs, grab those two highlighters. (I like to use one red one and one green one.)
“Then we mark everything we love doing—everything that gives us energy—with a green highlighter, and mark everything that sucked our energy—everything that made you want to procrastinate or made us feel anxious—with the red highlighter.”
3: Once we’ve completed the four steps above, each item on our list will have two components: (1) one to four dollar signs and (2) either red or green highlighting.
“Here’s where it gets really cool,” Dan observes. “I love this method, because with our Time and Energy Audit, we’ve created a prioritized hit list for all the work that is draining us.”
There are several strategies we can use to eliminate this work:
Strategy A: Delete unnecessary work. “First, if there’s any work that we can delete, delete it,” Dan writes. “Is there any work that is unnecessary? Sometimes we don’t realize we’re redoing work or simply creating extra steps. Often, once we write down these tasks, we’ll see redundancies that can be easily eliminated. . . [We may] see some really low-value items that are sucking our time (like browsing YouTube!),” he predicts. Which gives us the “clarity we need to fix our behavior.”
Strategy B: Delegate to current team members. “If we can’t delete a task, we want to delegate it,” he explains. As leaders, we may have taken on work that could or should belong to someone else on our team. We need to ask ourselves: “Can someone on our current team do this work?” If so, we must delegate it.
Strategy C: Find a creative solution. If it’s not an option to delegate the work, consider alternative solutions. “Start with the lowest-hanging fruit,” Dan recommends. “Pay someone overtime if we can. Find a freelancer, a virtual assistant, or (maybe even!) our nephew.”
Dan writes: “Now we can start to see what’s been robbing us. . . [We] use our creative minds to get rid of it. Remember, we have a Buyback Rate. Now we get to use it.”
More tomorrow!
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Reflection: How aware am I of where my time and energy are truly going, and what changes can I make to focus on high-value, energizing tasks?
Action: Commit to a two-week Time and Energy Audit, tracking every 15 minutes, then identify and delegate or eliminate at least one low-value, energy-draining task.
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