How do I track where my hours actually go so I know what to cut, without turning tracking into another chore?
The short answer
Audit for two weeks, not forever. Log your time in fifteen or thirty minute chunks for ten working days, then read it back and look for the leaks: reactive messaging, meetings that could be an email, rework, low-value busywork. You will almost certainly find that the work you think defines your day is a small slice of it. Fix the top two leaks, then stop tracking. The point is the diagnosis, not a permanent habit.
Go deeper, your way
3 hand-picked resources, 3 link-checked.
✍️ Essay
✓ Link checkedFreeIntermediate
Why we picked it
Sparks cofounded Mattermark and Holloway, so this is a founder's actual playbook, not a coach's theory. He gives you the whole loop in three moves (Get it, Know it, Use it) and, crucially, a four-question filter to run on every logged activity: stop it if nothing breaks when you don't, delegate it if someone else could do it, reassign the prep, or make it shorter. That filter is what turns a two-week log into two fixed leaks.
Why we picked it
This is the cleanest lightweight recipe to just start: track in 30-minute blocks against six named categories (revenue, delivery, operations, admin, strategy, reactive) in a plain spreadsheet or notebook. The move that makes it work is writing down your guess for each category first, then reading the gap between what you assumed and what the log says. Most founders guess 20 to 30 percent on revenue work and find they are at 10 to 15, and that gap is the whole diagnosis.
Why we picked it
Trenchard has watched a lot of founders run their calendars, and his core move is the one that makes buffer-based planning survive contact with reality: block one or two hours against your top three priorities when you are sharpest, then batch the reactive stuff (email, ad-hoc meetings) into defined windows instead of letting it bleed across the day. The practical lever for a founder who cannot escape fires is his insistence on saying no and ending every meeting with a decided outcome, so the reactive load that does hit you is compressed rather than open-ended. Read it as the how of protecting your 60%: guard the priority blocks, fence the firefighting into batches.
