What “I Don’t Have Time” Is Really Telling You

Issue #15

By Debbie Lawrence

Read Time: 8 minutes

You know the feeling. Your calendar is full and somehow you are still behind.

The meetings start early and run back to back. Email fills the gaps and by the time you get to the work you came in to do — the strategy conversation, the decision that needs your full attention, the thinking that requires more than twelve uninterrupted minutes — the day is over. Or close enough to over that you can’t start it now.

You tell yourself you’ll get to it tomorrow but tomorrow follows the same pattern.

Early in my career, I operated this way. I had a full schedule but I could not have told you, with any accuracy, where my time was actually going. I had a feeling about it. It was a rough sense or at least the story I told myself about why the important work that was not deadline driven kept getting pushed to the side. As a result it lurked in the corners, always quietly pressing on me as a reminder it was waiting for my attention.

It wasn’t until I started tracking my time in real time, on purpose, for months that I understood what I had been missing. I was a senior director then, developing projects, trying to estimate how long things would take. The only way to get accurate at that was to have historical data and the only way to have historical data was to track what I was actually doing.

What I learned from that habit of auditing my time changed more than my project management. It made the business more profitable and it changed how I lead and how I coach.

So when a team member tells me she does not have time to meet her targets, I recognize something in that. I also know it is rarely the complete picture.

What a time audit really is

What I learned to do is something called a time audit, which is a structured look at where your hours are going. It’s not where you think they are going or where you intend for them to go. It tells you exactly how long you’re dedicating to each task, project, meeting and event.

The gap between what you think is happening and what’s really occurring is where leadership decisions live.

A 2018 Harvard Business Review article by Dorie Clark found that many professionals significantly overestimate the amount of time they spend on their highest-priority work. Once they conducted a time audit, they discovered that strategic work occupied a far smaller portion of their week than they had believed. The audit did not create that gap. It revealed a gap that was already there.

That’s the point.

The pattern I see everywhere

When a team member complains to her manager that she doesn’t have time to get all her work done in a typical work week, there are three responses most leaders reach for.

The first is to accept it. The team member says she is overwhelmed, so you lighten the load, extend the deadline, or quietly absorb the task yourself.

The second is to push back. You know this role, especially when you’ve watched others do it. You know what is possible so you hold the standard that has been set and apply more pressure. In doing so, the conversation goes nowhere good especially as the team member walks away feeling unheard and misunderstood.

The third is to split the difference. You give her a little more time, a little less scope, and hope the situation improves on its own.

The problem with any of these approaches at this stage is that none of these responses are based on information. They are based on two competing narratives – hers and yours – and a judgment call about which one to believe. Neither of you has data and both of you have opinions so the conversation just circles and circles.

What is missing is a third voice in the room and that third voice is the data.

Katie’s situation

My client Katie had a team member who had been struggling to meet her targets for a couple of months. She consistently talked about feeling overwhelmed and asked for extensions. She described her workload as unmanageable and Katie’s expectations of her output as unrealistic.

Katie had looked at the role carefully. Other people had held this position and delivered without any issues. The workload was not new. Something specific was happening with this employee, and Katie needed to understand what it was before she could do anything useful about it.

She could have kept applying pressure or granting extensions. Instead, I recommended that she ask for something different, which was a time audit.

Every week for one month she asked the employee to track her time and then submit the log. The fields were straightforward: the date, the task or project, what she was doing within that task, her start time, her end time, and her progress notes.

Initially, the employee pushed back. Of course she did. Katie anticipated this response and was prepared to hold firm. Completing the time audit was not optional, and it was not personal. It was data they both needed and the only way to extract it was to track it.

At the end of the month, Katie uploaded the data into an AI tool and asked it to analyze the patterns.

The report was specific. In some areas, the scope of the work had quietly expanded since the role was first established. The employee had been right that those tasks were taking longer than they once did. It was affirming for her team member to see confirmation that aspects of the job had changed and nobody had named that. In other areas, she was spending a disproportionate amount of time on tasks that did not require that level of effort. She was also doing things that were not part of her role at all. She had gradually taken them on because she enjoyed them, what we call ‘job creep’, and they were consuming hours that should have gone elsewhere. And there were identifiable patterns of time that was simply not being used well in part because the employee was avoiding having to work on aspects of her job she didn’t enjoy.

The conversation that followed was different from every conversation they had before it. It was not Katie’s subjective assessment about the employee’s experience. It was both of them looking at the same set of facts.

The data was the third party in the room.

It was not a gotcha. It was a map and once they had it, they could decide how things would be navigated.

One thing I want to encourage before we go further: before you ask anyone on your team to do a time audit, do one yourself. You need to know what it feels like to track your time in real time. You need to experience the friction of logging things as they happen. You need to know what it’s like when you encounter the moment you realize how long something actually took versus how long you thought it did or when you recognize a pattern you were not expecting to find. You cannot coach someone as effectively through that process if you have never been through it yourself and the discomfort of the audit is part of its value. Do not skip it.

Remember that the purpose of the time audit is to give you information and that information alone is neutral. The audit is not an accusation. It is a flashlight and one that helps you to move forward in an informed, strategic and thoughtful manner.

The difference the audit makes

Without the audit, every conversation about time is a negotiation between two subjective experiences. The leader sees one thing. The team member feels another. No one has data so the conversation never leads to a productive outcome.

With the audit, something shifts. The data is not the leader’s opinion. It is not the team member’s feeling. It is what actually happened, logged in real time, over weeks. That is what makes it useful for coaching for performance.

Without a time audit you are managing by impression. You feel busy, you feel behind, but you cannot see exactly where the hours went or makes a clear case for change.

With a time audit you can see that ten hours a week are going to recurring meetings that do not require your level of judgment. You can see that the work you say matters most is getting less than an hour a day. You can make decisions based on what is true rather than what it feels like.

That is where the audit becomes a leadership tool rather than a productivity exercise.

BI before AI

I have kept a time-tracking log for a long time. It started as a practical tool for my consulting work, and it became one of the first tools I reach for when a client describes a performance gap on her team, or when she cannot figure out why her own strategic work is consistently not producing the outcomes she needs.

I always want all of us to be working smarter not harder and I am a proponent of using artificial intelligence to help us do that very thing. Here, though, is the principle I come back to every time: BI before AI. Business intelligence before artificial intelligence.

AI is a powerful tool. It can analyze data quickly, surface patterns, and produce insights in minutes. What it cannot do is create data that does not exist. If the information you feed it is incomplete, estimated, or reconstructed from memory, the output reflects that. The analysis is only as good as the quality of the raw material.

The time audit creates the business intelligence. It captures what is actually happening, accurately and specifically, in real time. Then AI can then do what it does best. That is the sequence Katie used. That is the sequence that produced a useful report rather than a general and subjective observation.

You cannot skip to the AI layer and expect clarity because the data has to come first. And for those of you who may be reluctant to use AI, I really want to encourage you to try it and experience it before you rule it out.

Leaders who operate on data lead differently than leaders who operate on impression. They delegate with confidence because they know what the work really takes. They hold standards with precision because they know where the gaps are. They advocate for themselves and their teams because they have something concrete to point to.

That is not a small difference. If anything it’s one of those valuable elements that I call a ‘difference maker.’

Your turn

If you are reading this and recognizing yourself in the opening — the full calendar, the strategic work that keeps getting pushed, the busy that never quite feels like progress — start there. Give yourself five days. Track your time as it actually happens for one full week at work. Don’t judge what you find. Just look at it.

If you have a team member where “I don’t have time” has become a recurring theme, consider the audit before you try anything else. Use it as a coaching tool, not a test. Ask her to submit her log weekly. Give it a month and let the data tell you what is going on before you decide what to do about it.

I so deeply believe in the effectiveness of carrying out a time audit that I have two time audit tools you can download for free. One is designed for the leader who wants to audit her own time. The other is designed for a team member’s audit. Both are Exc el spreadsheets, and both can be used with an AI analysis prompt you can paste directly into any AI tool once the data is logged (I’ve included the AI prompt for you as well). The prompt does the analytical work so you just need to give it something real to work with.

[Download both time audit tools by clicking here]

Comment below and tell me: Is there someone on your team right now where “I don’t have time” has become a recurring theme? What have you tried? And if you do a time audit and run the AI prompt, I absolutely want to hear about your outcome.

I read and reply to every response. And I love hearing from you.

You can also listen to this issue on The Compassionate Leader School podcast episode, which drops the same day on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major platforms. Click here to explore all the episodes.