In September, I wrote about the importance of knowing where your time goes. The factor that limits us the most is time. More than money or other resources. There are tons of ways to get more of both, but you will never get more time than we are given. Our only option is to use the time better. To know how you need to change, you need to know where you currently are.
Recently, I conducted another time log activity. For 10 work days in a row, I coded my time in 15-minute intervals into the following categories.
Buildings - Time spent in school buildings.
Personnel - Time spent on personnel matters
Budget - Time spent on cooperative or district fiscal matters
Legal/Compliance - Time spent on legal aspects of our work
Learning Outcomes - TIme spent on reviewing student outcomes or on activities to improve student outcomes
Relationships - Time spent on building trust and connections with internal and external stakeholders
Admin - Time spent on administrative tasks that keep the organization moving, but do not have a direct impact on the goals of the cooperative.
PD - Time spent on planning, preparing, providing, or participating in professional development activities. Staff evaluations and related activities are included in this area.
Communication - Time spent communicating with others through various methods about cooperative-related topics. Includes one-way and two-way communications, written and spoken.
Results
Below is the breakdown of the amount of time I spent in these categories. Some activities are coded as part of multiple categories (for example, staff evaluation activities are Personnel and PD). Because of this, the toe for all categories exceeds 100%
Buildings - 15%
Personnel - 22%
Budget - 5%
Legal/Compliance - 6%
Learning Outcomes - 17%
Relationships - 32%
Admin - 18%
PD - 25%
Communication - 33%
Reflection
My time in buildings went down from the last sampling. I can tell things have gotten busier. I need to be more intentional about scheduling time out of my buildings. I can also consider the order and arrangement of items on my schedule, so time that was spent in buildings in September does not get moved to virtual meetings.
The time sampling fell in a window of staff evaluations and a professional development day, so there was a steep increase in time spent on PD. This is work I could schedule strategically to be in buildings more.
There was an increase in focus on relationships, learning outcomes, communication, and PD which lines up with my values of FRECL. This tells me my values are leading my work.
My time spent on Admin tasks is still too high. I want to get better efficiency and structures around admin to get it under 10%. I need to consider delegating more and batching more.
I hope this is interesting. If you would like me to share more about my time analysis process in a future blog, like or comment below.