For many of us, we wake up and take the day as it comes. We let other people tell us what to do and how to spend our time. We check social media for a quick dopamine hit, followed by a scan of our email for the urgent tasks that have been doled out by someone else while concurrently cramming something in our mouths.

This is the way most people live their lives every single day. It is also analogous to walking into a pawn shop and asking the owner, “What is your best deal?” You’re going to be given something else someone wants to get rid of because they’re looking to maximise their own returns. We’d be mortified to be ripped off like this but we make these bargains every day with our time by letting other people’s agendas dictate our lives. 

It’s time to take back some control of your schedule and plan your day before it even begins by having a daily review and tracking how you spend your time.

1. Track Your Time 

I’ve made so many errors in business but the biggest was trading my time for something that I could hire someone else to do. Our goal in business is to create outcomes that are far greater than the time we put into them. 

If you’re investing an hour of your time and you deem this your time to be worth $100 an hour and the outcome you’re producing is worth $110 you’re producing a return on investment that is equal to 1.10. This isn’t a great return. We want to be producing at an output of at least 10 – 20 x on a regular basis whatever is we’re doing.  

To do this we need to understand where our time is being spent. To do this I use a tool called Toggl. 

I have three companies I work across but I separate my time for each company into five broad categories (called projects inside of Trello). These are:

 • Operations
 • Meetings
 • Marketing
 • Sales
 • Accounting 

I’ll also have subcategories like (Hakune – Writing) if I spend a lot of time on that category for that company. I then split up my personal commitments into three categories: 

 • Learning
 • Daily Administration
 • Daily Reviews 

Here is a quick Loom on how to do this inside of Toggl. By tracking my time I can then understand what tasks I’m working on and what this equates to on a per-hourly basis. If I use the example of Thursday again I can immediately see three tasks that I should have given to someone else based on my goal of working on tasks that exceed the value of $500 per hour. 

These were: 

1. Interviewing Emma (I could have given this to our GM at K&J)
2. Setting up Attentive (I could have given this to our marketing lead at Rugby Bricks)
3. Setting up LI automation demo (I could have given this to our ops team member at K&J)

I now have the privilege of team members but even if I were a solo-prenuer and I’d still try to outsource as much as possible. To make these comparisons I use this document with relative cost per hour of tasks and the relative value of those tasks to benchmark myself against them. 

As a new business owner, you may not have the capital to outsource at this stage but as you scale you want to be focusing on tasks that generate $500 – 5000 + per hour or spend more time on the things only you can do.

Our goal is to create as much value as possible for each minute we invest. To understand this we need to track our time and review how we spend it.

2. The Daily Review Template

A daily review is a simple exercise where you reflect on your day and simply plan for the next. I typically spend between 15 – 30 minutes towards the end of my day looking at four broad categories of my day: 

1. What did I get out of the day and what did it achieve?
2. Was I a good human and did I do things that align with my values?
3. Where was my time spent and could the tasks I was working on be automated or outsourced?
4. What do I want to do tomorrow? 

I’ve made a public template here that you can use. Look at the screenshot below and select “Make a copy”

I’m going to walk you through how I would look at my day in the screenshot earlier in the article and how I’d answer the questions in the template above in this video. 

Ultimately the daily review template is powered by understanding how you spend your time. Your goal in whatever you do is to make yourself more effective and you can only do this by measuring it. This article is the antidote to that problem. 

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