CHOOSE CATEGORIES
Track decisions you can actually change.
Start with a question: why does a planned afternoon of project work disappear? A time audit should help answer that question. For a workday, try delivery, meetings, messages, administration and breaks. For a whole-day audit, use work, study, travel, home and leisure instead. Combining both schemes usually creates more logging than insight.
Write a one-line rule for ambiguous activities. Reading client email belongs to messages even when the client is important. A meeting about a project remains a meeting. Consistency makes the comparison useful; a perfect taxonomy does not.
RECORD THE WEEK
Run the audit for seven ordinary days.
- Record the activity when you start it, using one active timer or a start time on paper.
- Stop or switch when the activity changes. Avoid counting the same minutes twice.
- Repair obvious mistakes that evening. Mark uncertain estimates instead of making them look exact.
- Keep the same category definitions through the week, including quieter days.
Do not turn the audit into a performance. A week in which you temporarily eliminate every distraction is a poor description of your normal routine. Leave gaps visible. Unrecorded time means the record is incomplete, not that the missing hours were wasted.
Record your audit with activities and an open timer in Chrono. Review the week or export your own copy. Get Chrono on Google Play →
READ THE RESULT
Use a small example to find the next action.
Suppose a work-only audit records 30 hours: 14 on delivery, 8 in meetings, 5 on messages and 3 on administration. Delivery represents 14 ÷ 30, or about 47% of recorded time. That is not a productivity score; some meetings may be essential delivery work in another role.
If your problem was an interrupted afternoon, inspect the sequence as well as the totals. Five short message checks can break one work block even when the combined duration looks small. Choose a change you control, such as one protected 45-minute block before opening messages. Repeat the audit later under comparable conditions.
RECORD WITH CHRONO
Use Chrono when you want the log on your phone.
Chrono provides activities, editable time entries and daily, weekly and monthly time-distribution views. Use activities for your broad categories and short notes for context. An open timer fits an audit because the activity may end before a fixed focus interval does.
Export the week as CSV if you want your own calculations or a durable copy. Core tracking and local history work offline without an account. This is a personal audit workflow: it does not provide automatic observation of every app you use or a complete record of time you never logged.
05 · QUICK ANSWERS
How to Do a Seven-Day Time Audit, briefly.
Only if that helps your question. A work-only audit can be useful; label its scope and leave unrecorded time visible.
Seven ordinary days is a useful starting sample. Repeat when your schedule changes or when the first week was unusual.