September is here, and despite most of us being a long way from our years of education, that ‘back to school’ feeling lingers. As summer ends, we all want to hit the restart button and start afresh, ready to make the most of the final few months of the year (before they’re swallowed up by Christmas).
While your natural inclination may be to focus your resetting efforts on your home or your career, may we suggest a different area first? We reckon that before you get stuck in on clearing out your cupboards or rejigging your weeknight dinners, you need to tackle a declutter of something that underpins, well, everything.
We’re talking about time. Time is the one universal thing we all have to navigate. The pressure to use our time well hits everyone. And there’s always a voice – whether that’s internal or from the hustle culture productivity influencers online – that tells us we’re spending our time all wrong: that we’re failing to make the most of it, that we’re wasting it, that we’re running out of it and doing or buying one thing is the only way to stem the tide.
The reality is this: how you spend your time is no one’s business but your own. But to avoid regret, it’s important to spend it consciously, dedicating your limited time on earth to things that make you truly content rather than mindlessly sacrificing it to stuff that doesn’t really matter to you or do you any good (say, doomscrolling).
A good starting point on your journey to do this is a time audit. Or, as we like to call it, a time declutter. And the first week of September is the ideal time to do it. Sarah Stewart, a time management coach and the author of upcoming book Project Manage Your Life, says: ‘The summer holidays are over, we’re getting back into our routines and there is this sense of “let’s get organised” in the air. It’s a fantastic time to do a refresh and see where your time is actually going.’
The purpose of a time audit is to assess how your days are spent. ‘Most people think they know how they spend their time – but they don’t,’ Sarah explains. ‘We rely on memory, which is flawed, biased and self-serving. Most of us overestimate our productivity and underestimate our distractions. If I asked you how you spent your time last week, you might have a rough idea. However, when people track it, the reality is often very different.’
By doing the exercise, you’ll get a clearer, more accurate picture of how you truly spend your time, not how you think you spend it. From there, you can identify ‘hidden patterns, distractions or time-consuming tasks that go unnoticed’, also known as ‘time clutter’. You’ll also be able to figure out when you’re at your best (Are you a morning owl or someone who gets a flurry of energy at 3pm?) and begin scheduling tasks accordingly to work with your energy, rather than against it; a technique called chronoworking.
On a personal note, I did this exact technique after meeting Sarah a few years back, and I can honestly say it changed my life for the better. Since doing a time audit and a time declutter, my screentime is way down, I feel less rushed (and like I magically have more time in the day), and I’ve been able to do things that make me happy. I published my first book, Working On Purpose, last year, and have told everyone I know that it wouldn’t have been possible without having used this approach.
There’s often an assumption that optimising your time is a goal only for people of a certain age, perhaps early on in their career. In fact, everyone can benefit from decluttering their time – perhaps especially so when you’re over 60 and may be looking at stepping away from full-time employment.
‘So many of us run our lives on autopilot, not stopping to think about our time and how we spend it,’ Sarah tells Good Housekeeping. ‘Left unaddressed, I think not being intentional with your time and pausing to assess and declutter, can lead to burnout. I can imagine that when the external structure of commutes, meetings and so on are removed in retirement that days can shift into more effortless activities (like watching TV or scrolling on our phones) if there hasn’t been a conscious or intentional plan in advance for how you will spend your time. It’s a bit like when I’m on holiday, and my anchors of routine are removed… I can feel adrift. In retirement, it’s not necessarily about spending our time ‘productively’ but rather making sure that the time is going towards the things that really matter… like relationships, health or greater purpose.’
That’s why we should do a time audit followed by a time declutter. Now let’s get into the how.
How to do a time audit
Before Sarah ever starts mentoring clients on how to use their time more effectively, this is the exercise she tasks them with: ‘For the next week, you’re going to track your time in 30-minute blocks across the full 24 hours of each day. This is one of the most revealing exercises I do with my clients and often one of the most surprising.’
Here’s Sarah’s step-by-step guide:
Step one: set it up
You’ll need a simple tracking sheet – either a spreadsheet or a printed template divided into 30-minute slots across a full week.
Step two: fill it in
You don’t need to stop every 30 minutes and log what you’ve been doing. Instead, fill it in at natural pause points throughout the day. Here’s how I tend to do it:
- Morning – when I sit down at my desk, I’ll record what time I got up and what I did before work
- Lunchtime – I’ll fill in the morning’s activities before I take a break
- End of workday – I’ll log what I did that afternoon before closing my laptop
- Before bed – a final check to capture the evening
The key reason for doing it this way is memory. If you wait until the end of the day, you’ll have forgotten far more than you’d expect – especially at the level of detail that makes this exercise genuinely useful.
Step three: categorise
Think of yourself like a lawyer or a freelancer billing time to different projects. You want to know exactly where the hours went. That includes:
- Work activities – be specific. Not just ‘work’, but emails, meetings, a particular project, a client call, admin, social media, finance etc. Whatever the relevant categories are for your role.
- Life outside work – we’re looking at our time holistically, not just a working day. For many people, the line between work and home is blurred. Log your sleep, meals, family time, chores, exercise, TV, phone scrolling – all of it.
Step four: layer in device data
At the bottom of your tracking sheet, leave space to record metrics from your phone or smartwatch at the end of each day. Useful data points might include:
- Daily screen time
- Number of phone pick-ups
- Step count
- Sleep quality
These numbers, alongside your time log, can reveal patterns you’d never spot otherwise.
A note on detail: The more honest and detailed you are, the more useful the data.
How to identify time clutter – and what to do about it
Once you have the data provided by your time audit, it’s time to make sense of it. And the first step is to identify what stuff is filling up your day with nothingness without you noticing. To do this...
Consider the week as a whole
‘Before we drill into the details, let’s step back and look at the week as a whole,’ says Sarah. ‘Ask yourself: Does this week feel representative? If it was unusually busy, or unusually quiet, it’s worth noting this context before drawing any conclusions. How did the week feel and does that match what you see on paper?’
Add up your categories
‘Total up the hours spent in each area of your life – work, sleep, family, exercise, personal time, chores and so on. I like to colour code the blocks in my spreadsheet, with a different colour for each category.’
Ask yourself some questions
- What are the things that you spent your time doing this week that don’t neatly fit into a category?
- Are you happy to be spending that time on those things?
- Where is the majority of your time going?
- Which areas are getting less time that you’d like?
- Which areas are getting more time than you realised?
- What surprises you?
‘Cast your eye over the week and think about not just what happened but when,’ advises Sarah. ‘You may start to notice a pattern: certain times of the day where you were focused and productive; and others where you were sluggish, distracted or just going through the motions.’
Look closely at what you got up to and how the time spent aligns with how you’d like to spend your time. Are you spending more time than you’d like watching TV, for example? Less time reading books you enjoy? Ask yourself some more questions, looking at each way you spent your time:
- Does completing this task help me live according to my values?
- Is this something I think genuinely matters?
- Does this task move me closer to my long-term vision?
- Does this task fit into my big-picture goals?
- Did doing this make me happier or healthier?
If the answer to the above questions is a resounding no, you’ve found your time clutter. Then, it’s time to be ruthless in cutting it back. What can you delegate to someone else? What could you outsource? What could you ditch entirely? Is there a way to make your time clutter take up a bit less space on your calendar?
Think about this declutter as being in service of making space in your time for the things you do care about, that you truly value, that make you feel good. If that means saying ‘No’ to a coffee with a ‘friend’ who always leaves you feeling down so you have time to finally get in the garden and plant the vegetables you always wanted, that feels like a great swap. Or perhaps it’s deciding that actually paying for a gardener to do the initial digging so you can just do the bits you enjoy is well worth it.
