Tracking Your Time - A Sneak Peek at a New Himalaya Learning Podcourse

Jeremy · 0:00

Hey, friends, thanks for tuning in to The Leader Assistant Podcast. It's your host, Jeremy Burrows. And this is a bonus episode. It's going to be a little bit different. I had the privilege of working on an audio course for Himalaya Learning from Himalaya Media. They have an app and website where you can listen to podcasts. So if you need a new podcast listening app, you can go to Himalaya on the App Store or himalaya.com. And they asked me to do a pod course. So it's launching today. Again, you can check out the Himalaya Learning platform. It's brand new at himalaya.com. And you can use the promo code, Keys, that's K-E-Y-S, to get your first 14 days free on the Himalaya Learning app. So this episode of The Leader Assistant Podcast is going to have a sneak peek to that course. The course is called 7 Keys to Reclaiming Your Time, Energy, and Productivity. And it's available exclusively on Himalaya Learning. So this next section that you're going to hear is the entire lesson one or episode one of that pod course. As a listener of The Leader Assistant Podcast, you get a sneak peek and get to listen to the entire lesson. And it's the entire first key in the pod course. So I hope you enjoy it. And I hope you check out himalaya.com and check out the 7 Keys to Reclaiming Your Time, Energy, and Productivity course. I teach all seven lessons, and you can use the promo code K-E-Y-S to get your first 14 days free on their learning platform. All right, I'll let you take a listen to the first lesson in that course, and we'll talk to you soon. You're listening to 7 Keys to Reclaiming Your Time, Energy, and Productivity, a Himalaya Learning Audio course. Be sure to check out all of the other exclusive courses in the Himalaya app or on himalaya.com. What's up everybody? My name is Jeremy Burrows. Welcome to 7 Keys to Reclaiming Your Time, Energy, and Productivity, an exclusive pod course from Himalaya Learning. I am obsessed with helping people save time, reclaim their energy, and get stuff done. You could call my job title a time and energy maker, but I'm also officially known as an executive assistant. So what I do is day in and day out, is I help my executive reclaim his time, energy, and productivity. And so I'm going to help you do the same. But before I jump in, I want to just do a quick introduction to let you know a little bit more about me. I'm from Kansas City, Missouri, and I've been an executive assistant for about 13 and a half, 14 years, depending on when you're listening to this pod course. And I am married to my wife, Megan. We have two boys, Weston and Silas, and we have a blast playing video games, riding bikes, jumping on the trampoline, and my wife and I enjoy fancy cocktails and good beer. So I have, like I mentioned, been an executive assistant for a long time, and I'm very passionate about helping people save time, get more energy, and get more done. And so what we're going to do is each of these episodes, I'm going to talk about a different way, a different key to reclaiming your time and energy and producing more. So for episode one, we're going to talk about track your time. The first key is tracking your time. So how are you supposed to make the most of your time if you don't have a grasp on what you actually do with your time day in and day out? So what I'm going to do is I'm going to help you practically track your time and share a story about my executive and how I've tracked his time and how that's been helpful, and then give you a simple take-home action item by the end of the lesson. So first, what I want you to do is take a historical audit. So a historical audit is the last four to six weeks, you look back and you look at all the different activities you did and you start tracking them. So historical audits are good because you may get asked, or I may ask you, okay, what did you spend your time on last week? And you may say, well, I was in meetings. Well, if you actually look back at your week and go, you know, calendar event by calendar event, day by day, hour by hour, you may actually find out that you weren't in as many meetings as you thought. So the idea of a historical audit is to really look at the data objectively and that way you're not just subjectively saying, oh, I think I was in meetings most of the week. And then an ongoing tracker is where once you've done that historical audit, you can keep track of what you are doing on an ongoing basis. That way it's a little more fresh in your mind and you can get a little bit more granular with your data and accurate versus just trying to remember what you did two weeks ago. So again, practically speaking, this tracking your time includes a historical audit, an ongoing track, and then the key to remember as you track things is that data is king. So again, if you say, oh, I spent most of my time in meetings, but then you look at the real data and you realize that 30% of your time was in meetings and 50% of your time was actually checking email. So that's a very interesting data point to consider as you proceed throughout this course, and we try to help you gain more time and energy and productivity. So to kind of share a story of how this has worked for my current executive, my current executive is CEO of Capacity. We are an artificial intelligence help desk support automation platform, and my CEO was the founders of a company that acquired answers.com, and then they sold it off in 2014 for almost a billion dollars. So this guy is successful, has had a lot of, has had some solid assistance over the years, and he has also had issues with managing his time and burning out and trying to be as efficient as possible with every minute of every day. So what I did with him was I set up a tracker with our Google Calendar, we use Google Suite, a Google spreadsheet, and then a Zapier, zapier.com workflow that would log every event when it concluded, every event would be logged into a Google spreadsheet. So I was able to set this up because before I would manually go through and count and say this is how many sales meetings you had, this is how many internal meetings you had, and so on. So I found out this workflow with Zapier, Google Calendar, and Google spreadsheet saved me hours and hours and days of work trying to track this stuff. And it's automatic. So then once the data got inputted into the Google spreadsheet, I was able to manipulate that data, set up some conditional formatting, and essentially have a nice chart and graph and numbers that literally say, these are the number of meetings you had with sales potential clients. These are the number of investor meetings you had this quarter, this month. And that allowed me to look at it and say, okay, how do you think your time was spent this last quarter? And then I could show him the data and say, actually, this is how you spent your time. And so then we could say, all right, what do we need to do for the next quarter? How do we need to shift? And we'll talk about that in some of the upcoming lessons. But the key is, again, you will not be able to manage something that you don't have a grasp of. You will not be able to manage something that you don't know what it is. So taking a historical audit, tracking your time on an ongoing basis and remembering that data is king will help you get a grasp on where you're actually spending your time. Now, I'm not just talking about work, your work life. I'm talking about your personal life as well. Where did you spend your time? Did you watch Netflix for three hours every Friday and Saturday night? Did you work on your house on Saturday morning for seven hours because the project took forever? Did you hang out with your kids? How much time did you spend with your kids? This will really, this audit and this tracking of your time will really illuminate some of those areas where it might shock you, honestly. And it will help you kind of refocus and again, as the course is called, reclaim your time and energy. You may think, oh, I'm tired all the time because I'm in meetings all the time, or I'm tired all the time because I spend so much time working on my house. And then you look at the numbers and you look at the data and it's like, wait a minute, I actually only spent five hours last month working on my house. But I spent 50 hours watching Netflix. So maybe I should get more active and maybe I should do more exercise to help my energy be higher. Or maybe I should go to bed earlier and watch one less show at night so that I get better rest and have more energy throughout the day. So again, track your time, take an audit of where you actually spend your time. So for your homework, for your little take-home action plan, I want you to open up a Google spreadsheet or an Excel spreadsheet, and don't get crazy with it. Just literally lay out the schedule. Go four to six weeks back and log roughly how many hours you spent on each type of activity each week. Netflix, emails, phone calls, meetings, family time, special projects, nap, uninterrupted focus blocks, and so on. Once you go through and you just kind of list these out and you may find as you go through your last four to six weeks that there are different types of tasks that you didn't think about that you need to add, that's fine. Just go through and just kind of track about how many hours. You can do it by, you know, half an hour increments is fine. And then just do that for the last four to six weeks. It really shouldn't take you too long, especially if you have most of the stuff on your calendar. If you don't track most of your activities on your calendar, that's okay. Go back as far as you can. Maybe it's only two weeks and write down what you spent your time on. Maybe ask your partner or your roommate or your kids where they remember you spending your time. Once you get that data, you can do a quick YouTube or Google search and figure out how to turn those into a chart or formula or a pie chart. That way you can just kind of see, okay, this is how you visually see quickly where you've spent your time. All right. So again, start a simple spreadsheet. Don't make it too complicated. Write down the last four to six weeks. Just go through and just log how many hours you spent. And don't get too crazy. You don't have to be exact right now. Because again, what I want you to do once you do the historical audit, use that same sheet, maybe a different tab or down in a different section. You can do your kind of ongoing. So maybe every night, take like five minutes to just log how you spent your time that day. And do that for a couple of weeks from now till a couple weeks from now. That way you get a really good data set instead of just a small sample size. So again, simple spreadsheet, log the last four to six weeks. And then for the next couple of weeks, every day or two, go on, add your ongoing tracking time. And then create a visual representation of that, that you can quickly reference, that you can share with your partner, you can share with your boss, you can share with your assistant, whoever it is that you're trying to work with to help you reclaim that energy and that time. You can share that audit with them. So feel free to reach out if you have any questions. You can get a hold of me at jeremy at goburrows.com. That's go, burrows.com. Feel free to reach out. I also have an online course at track dot assistance guide.com. That's free. That walks through how to do the Google Calendar to Zapier to Google spreadsheet automated audit process. And it even includes a link to the template that I use, a link to the Zapier. So you can just copy it into your Zapier account, and you can set that up. And that's for the ongoing tracking of your time if you use Google Calendar. I'm sure there's a way if you're a Microsoft calendar or an Apple calendar person, I'm sure there's a way to do that. There are different time tracking apps that you can look up as well that you can kind of ongoing track your time just by clicking a button or checking into the app. So that might be an easier way for you if you find the spreadsheet to be tedious and cumbersome. So, all right, that's track your time. That's key number one. I look forward to talking with you in episode two. What you just heard was 7 Keys to Reclaiming Your Time, Energy, and Productivity, a Himalaya Learning audio course. Be sure to check out all of the other exclusive courses in the Himalaya app or on himalaya.com.