The printable week audit

One hundred and sixty-eight boxes, one for each hour of the week. Print it, keep it where you work, and fill in each hour as it finishes rather than at the end of the day.

Print this page Prints as the grid alone, on one sheet.

Why a hundred and sixty-eight

Because that is how many hours there are in a week, and because counting a week rather than a day is what makes the arithmetic honest. A day can be unusual. A week rarely is.

The approach is Laura Vanderkam’s, and her point is the useful one: people describe their weeks in language that does not survive contact with the grid. “I have no time” becomes a specific set of hours, and some of them turn out to be doing something other than what you would have said.

How to use it without abandoning it

1. Fill it in hourly, not daily. The whole value is in not reconstructing. An hour filled in at six in the evening is a guess wearing a number.
2. Write what you were actually doing, in your own words. Not the category you think it belongs to.
3. Leave blanks blank. An hour you cannot account for is the most useful mark on the sheet. Do not fill it in with something plausible.
4. Do not change anything this week. The temptation is to start optimising on Tuesday, which destroys the measurement you are trying to take.
5. Count it on Sunday. Work, sleep, everything else. Then ask which of the three surprised you.

The honest part

Most people abandon this by Wednesday. That is not a character flaw and it is worth saying before you start, because people who fail at it tend to conclude something about themselves rather than about the method.

It fails for a structural reason: it asks you to do something at the moment you are busiest, and it depends entirely on you remembering. The weeks you most want the data from — the overloaded ones — are precisely the weeks you will not fill it in.

Two things help. Fill in the hour that has just gone rather than the one coming, because you know what happened in it. And put the sheet where your hands already are, not in a drawer. If you have tried before and it collapsed, try a smaller interval on fewer days rather than trying harder.

What to do with it when the week is over

• Add up the blanks first. That total is the number most worth knowing, and it is the one a timer can never tell you.
• Find the largest unbroken run of work. If your longest is under ninety minutes, fragmentation is your problem rather than hours.
• Compare it with what you would have said on Monday. The gap between the two is the actual finding.
• Keep the sheet. One week is a snapshot; four is a picture. They are worth more together than separately.

Questions people ask

Do I have to record the sleeping hours too?

Record them, but do not agonise over them. They are shaded on the grid because they are usually the least interesting rows and the most tempting to skip. The hours either side of sleep are often where a week is actually won or lost.

Is one week really enough?

It is enough to be surprised by, which is the point of the first one. It is not enough to draw a conclusion about a trend — for that you want four, which is also when the seasonal noise starts to average out.

What if my week is atypical?

Every week is atypical. That is the most common reason people postpone doing this, and postponing it indefinitely is the usual outcome. Record the odd week; an odd week is still information, and it is more information than you have now.