Time Audit · Session 3 Pre-Work

0 blocks tagged

The Visibility Gap · Session 3 Pre-Work

Your Time Audit

Time: ~20 minutes. Do this before Session 3 and bring it with you — one of you will design a brand-new operating rhythm live, built straight off an audit just like this.

Your calendar is the most honest document you own. It doesn’t say what you value — it shows it. Before we design a system that scales, we have to see where your time actually goes. Not where you think it goes. Where it goes.

This is a backward-looking audit. Pull up your last five working days and account for them in 30-minute blocks. You’ll have watched Why Your Calendar Is Your Operating System before this — the audit is where that idea stops being a video and starts being your week.

This worksheet doesn’t save anything. Fill it in one sitting, then print it or save it as a PDF to keep.

The four categories

Every block gets exactly one tag.

Align

Keeping people pointed the same direction.

Looks like1:1s, stand-ups, status syncs, stakeholder updates.

Decide

Making or unblocking a real decision.

Looks likePrioritisation, approvals, trade-off calls, removing a blocker.

Learn

Building insight or capability — yours or your team’s.

Looks likeDeep work, analysis, coaching a report, protected thinking time.

Noise

Low-leverage, reactive, or not-your-job.

Looks likeRedundant meetings, Slack churn, tickets a report should own, constant context-switching.

One rule: tag a block for what it actually produced, not what it was called. A “decision meeting” where nothing got decided is Noise.

How to do it

1Open your calendar to the last five working days.
2Go block by block, 30 minutes at a time. Reconstruct the blank stretches from memory — and be honest about them.
3Tag each block A / D / L / N.
4Don’t optimise as you go. Just record. The pattern is the whole point.

A worked block, so you see the grain:

Time block

What happened

Tag

09:00–09:30

Standup, then cleared three Slack threads

09:30–10:00

Reviewed Daniel’s churn analysis, gave direction

The five days

Fill what’s true. Add or delete rows so the times match your real day.

The tally

Counts update as you tag. We’re looking for shape, not precision.

Tag

Blocks

% of week

Align

—

Decide

—

Learn

—

Noise

—

Tagged total

100%

The shape of your week

Tag your blocks to see the split

Align Decide Learn Noise

What the audit is telling you

Three honest answers. These are exactly what we’ll work from in the room.

1Where is the Noise concentrated? Name the single biggest source — one meeting, one channel, one habit.

2What in your week can only you do? (It’s almost always less than you think.)

3Where are you doing someone else’s job? Be specific: whose, and which block.

Star the one block this week you most wish you’d never agreed to. That’s where we start.

Save this in your vault under 07 Weekly Updates. In Session 3 we use it twice: once to find your leverage — what only you can do vs. what you’ve delegated to yourself by default — and once to design your operating rhythm, the Personal / Team / Stakeholder cadences that protect your Decide and Learn time and starve the Noise.

You can’t design a system that scales until you’ve seen the one you’re running by accident. This is that.

Done? Save a copy before you close this tab.

This worksheet doesn’t save your answers anywhere. Download a PDF now and bring it to Session 3.