The old management adage that says “you can’t manage what you can’t measure” definitely has some truth to it. Ever since we started Community Christian Church I have tracked my time each week. For the longest time I tracked it in Excel, making my own list of tasks and categories that I spent my time on and listing how I spent my time each day. Unfortunately, that system made it difficult to look at multiple weeks, or months, at one time.

Last November I searched around and found myhours.com. It’s not flashy, by any means, but it gets the job done. I’ve tracked my time in there since the beginning of November. Basically you can create projects, and each project has tasks that you set up. I created a project for church, and all the tasks represent how I spend my time.

I ran a report to list my time by task, and then put that into Excel and grouped the tasks into categories so I could see generally where I spend my time. Here are the results with some of my observations below:

• Some of the 0% weren’t actually 0 hours, just so few that it rounded to 0.
• I’m glad leadership was the leading time consumer, as that’s my primary job
• Admin was mostly dominated by time spent on email
• Our children’s ministry is divided up into 3 environments, Preschool, Discovery Island and KidStuf. Having great leaders of those environments frees me up from spending time there. KidStuf is an exception because I have a part in it, which is like everyone else’s and involves a lot of time in rehearsals.
• Learning was high, but a lot of that has to do with just coming back from 6 days of conferences, so that will go down as the year goes on. But, I want learning to be around 10% because it’s directly affects the leadership category.
• I hope the 3% of time I’m investing in other churches is helping

Do you track your time? Where is it going?