There’s a new app in town that’s stirring up a lot of buzz. It gives you superhuman powers to tackle one of life’s most soul sucking activities: e-mail. It’s actually called _Superhuman_ and borrows marketing tricks from both Supreme and trendy nightclubs – building up a waiting list of users and using luxury pricing ($30/month, gasp!). I’ve been blessed with a few invites from the connected-Rad-fam, but have respectfully declined. Yes, I’m a bit cheap. But more importantly: __I don’t have an email problem.__ I knew this because over the past ten days I spent 32 minutes per day on email (sending and receiving 53.8 messages). These figures are so precise because they were the result of __a time audit.__ I ran this audit to answer two simple questions: __Was I spending my time intentionally? And were my activities aligned with my life priorities?__ So I put my professional (i.e. RadReads) life through chronological proctology exam, combining logs from the Toggl app and notes from my calendar. And tbh, I was quite nervous about what the results would show. ![Blog post image](/images/blog/10-days-of-RadReads-.png) ## The (infamous) Important, Not Urgent category Ah, the infamous “snooze” button for our most precious, but hard to nail down activities. Health, [Habits](), Recruiting, Learning, [Marriage](), Parenting, [Finances](). The lack of deadlines and accountability makes it easy to “kick the can down the road.” What would my Time Audit reveal about this oft-neglected category? I ?you, top right corner The Eisenhower Matrix presents two challenges. First, can you strike the right balance between things that lie in the top half (_Important, with varying Urgencies_)? And second, can you strike as many activities as possible from the bottom half? ## The first principles of my workflow Over the years, my approach to work has been organized around three core first principles. These principles aren’t set in stone (and I often think about _how to balance structure vs serendipity_) and they are a byproduct of the desire to work for myself. Here are the 3 principles: ### 1\. Manage energy over time Here’s a chart of my energy over the course of the day: This graph is consistent with my tendencies as a _morning person_. As such, I protect the mornings for deep thinking, reading and writing time and keep the afternoon for the more mundane activities (emails and bill paying.) [The Power of Full Engagement: ]()[Managing Energy, Not Time, Is the Key to High Performance and Personal Renewal]() (ironically written by Trump’s biographer Tony Schwartz) has deeply influenced this approach. ### 2\. Single-task aggressively Multi-tasking doesn’t work for me. The cost of switching tasks (even briefly) is punitive (research has shown [a 40% drop in productivity]() from constant task-switching). I use Pomodoros (25 minute deep work intervals) to make sure I don’t get lost context-switching. ### 3\. Manage priorities using GTD [Getting Things Done]() is David Allen’s productivity framework for balancing the Important category. It’s centered around the concept of an _Inbox_ to quickly capture your tasks, heavy _Tagging_ (using meta-data) and a _Review Process_ (to evaluate Important, Not Urgent). Here’s a webinar on [how I use GTD with the Omnifocus app](). ## How to conduct a time audit While it may sound daunting, it’s extremely easy to conduct time audit using the following three approaches. * __Use an app:__ I used a free service [Toggl]() which has both an iOS app and Chrome Extension, covering my two modes of work (phone and laptop). I’ve also used the [Hours app](). * __A journal:__ An analog approach consisting of pen and paper. Every activity gets logged on a separate page of a notebook. * __Calendar approach:__ A more deliberate approach of proactively structuring your day around your priorities (which doesn’t work for me.) Practically speaking, the best approach probably combines two of the three. For me I tracked with an app and then manually layered in my meetings by looking at my calendar. ## Show me the damn results! You’ve waited this long, here’s a 10 day breakdown of RadReads (spanning two newsletter issues). ![Blog post image](/images/blog/Cumulative-Activities-10-day.png) ### Relationships * 24% * 11 hours total, 1 hour/day I refuse to call this category _networking_ , but the majority of my time is spent hanging with members of the Rad Community (both IRL and via Skype). There’s no greater joy than listening to your stories, [teaching what I know](), and [engineering serendipity]() amongst community members. And in the truest example of abundance, it’s these relationships that drive 90% of my story ideas __AND__ the referrals to my coaching business. __Damn, I’m lucky!__ ### Blogging * 19% * 8:30 hours total, 50 minutes/day Can you hit a home run every week??? This consists of the weekly essay. While these used to be 1 hour (500 word) ruminations, they have evolved tremendously. Now, each piece is reported, illustrated and SEO-optimized – averaging 2,000 words and drastically increasing the time spent. __This is an area that merits further investigation.__ ### Coaching * 24% * 11 hours total, 1 hour/day I’ve slowly grown my practice to cover the _Psychology of Money_ , _Career Transitions, and Productivity+Workflow Diagonstics_ and coaching is a significant income contributor. Given the intensity of the work, I limit these activities to 6-8 clients at any given point in time. The Time Audit revealed that the amount of prep work required for each session. ### Email * 12% * 5:23 hours total, 32 minutes/day I answer non-urgent emails at the end of the day and in one sitting. For open-ended requests (“Do you have any Bali recommendations?”) I’ll morph them into tasks, and if I’ve been asked the question 3+ times I’ll turn it into a Google Doc or a blog post. This number could be lower, but as you guys know,__I answer every single reader question.__ ### Reading * 10% * 4:30 hours total, 25 minutes/day My reading is almost equally split between RadReads articles and books. I’d like to get the book time up a little bit. ### Newsletter * 10% * 4:10 hours total, 25 minutes/day Each issue takes approximately 2 hours to produce, covering blurb-writing to formatting. I’m working on getting this down to 1 hour with the help of contractors. ### Maintenance * 4% * 1:45 hours total, 10 minutes/day There’s a lot of unsexy behind the scene work of upgrades, cross-posting, and WordPress glitches. Just this week, I noticed that many of my images were too big and could impact my ranking with search engines. ### R&D * 4% * 1:43 hours total, 10 minutes/day So the most important category is the last one, __SAD__!!! But here’s the reality of working for yourself, there’s not a lot of slack for developing long-term projects. As you see from the list of activities, I don’t see a ton of places where I could _cut the fat_. On Reddit, I asked fellow solopreneur (and [Company of One]() evangelist) Paul Jarvis how he balanced __Important+Urgent__(short-term needs of the business) with __Important+Not Urgent__ (Long-term growth), given the lack of resources (emphasis mine): > _So that’s how I started with products, almost exactly 🙂 My services took up most of my time (and paid)____so I only had a sliver to work on new ideas like products.____So you’re exactly where I was. I spent a small amount of my time creating my first in between client work. I spent zero dollars on it, and it was quite small. But as it did well and generated income, I was able to treat products from there almost like a client – where part of my time was bought by my product income to work on new products._ His advice about starting small and treating your R&D as a “client” really stuck with me: > ___I think the key is starting super small.____My first product was a short book. I traded to get it copyedited and for the things I needed to shoot the photos for it. I took a month or so, even with only a few hours a week. Since it was small, I could launch it quickly, see if it worked in the market, then build on it. Even my first online course was tiny, and I spent a small amount of time on it.____Then as demand and income from those things grew, I put more time into products, and slowly moved away from services.____That process took almost 3 years total though to go from full-time services to full-time products. And I only increased my product time when my products were making more income._ ## The final verdict? I used a _heat map_ to color code each activity relative to its importance and time spent (red = needs to change, green = working well). The RadReads heat map The biggest gap is in R&D which consists of researching and producing a series of courses for the Rad community. The matrix shows me that I probably should dial down my relationships, extract efficiencies out of the newsletter/blog and try to read a bit more. Thanks for reading! I’d be curious to know what your Time Audit reveals. ___P.S. The Time Audit (combined with Important, Not Urgent) are coaching modules I use with high performing execs and entrepreneurs. If we should be chatting, hit me up: khe [at] radreads [dot] co.___