“If I could have my wasted days back,
Would I use them to get back on track?”
–Metallica

Frantic. That’s the name of the song where I pulled that quote and, besides being a damn good song (yes, I was one of a handful of people that liked St. Anger), there is a pretty important message in those lyrics. Whether you are a business owner like me or work for someone else, the idea of doing more with less isn’t just a catch phrase, it’s a reality. There are only 24 hours in a day and the To Do list grows every week. If you want to get a hold of a schedule spiraling out of control, I propose you do an audit.  That’s right: those five letters that cause so much fear when uttered by the IRS may in fact be a time saver when you do one yourself.

Like you, I was getting buried in tasks. I literally work from a half an hour after I wake up to an hour before I go to bed. If you’ve ever been brushing your teeth and reading your e-mail at the same time, you are in the same boat as me. So what do you do about it? The first task is to simply keep track of what you do and how much time you spend doing it for one week. This is the time to get anal retentive. Detail, detail, detail. The goal here is to get a realistic picture of what your day looks like, so be brutally honest. Once you have your list, it’s time to get organized. After, looking over my list I saw some patterns emerge, and was able to group my activities into 4 categories. Some of you will have more and some will have less. To help you get started, here are mine:

1. Money Making
2. Research
3. Maintenance
4. Personal

Money making is pretty obvious: my activities that directly generate revenue. For me, it’s performing SEO for clients and my own affiliate business. Research is the stuff you need to do to stay a head of the game, whether this is reading industry news or researching new ways to do your job better. Maintenance is the routine crap you do every day that isn’t sexy but needs to be done to keep the ship afloat, like washing dishes, going to the bank, etc… And finally, personal time is just what it sounds like. Think of it as investing in your relationships, with phone calls, e-mails, or a social networking site.
For this next step I use a spreadsheet program. MS Excel is great, but you can get an equally useful and free spreadsheet program at Openoffice.org. Create a little matrix like this:

Now that you have a list you can sort that hour column from greatest to least, which will put your most tim-intensive task on top. This is the map of your daily life. If you are like me, you may have seen some disturbing patterns emerge. For instance, I found out that I spend over 3 hours a day on message boards and social networking sites. Ouch! If you read my article about the economic advantages of time management you would know that I’m throwing money down the drain. Hey, I like looking at my friends’ pictures from their trip to Alaska, but am I willing to forgo thousands of dollars in lost productivity? I think not.

If you did this correctly, it will be a true eye opener as to how your time is really spent. Once you see just how much time you allocate to your daily activities, you can adjust accordingly. Life comes at you pretty fast. If you don’t reduce the silly stuff to its proper proportion you’re going to end up, well, Frantic.