Where does your time go?

Let’s take a look at the day of an average professional, and see if we can find some extra time in their day.

7:00 a.m. – Wake up and get ready for the day, making mental notes about the day’s top priorities.

8:00 a.m. – Drive to work.

9:00 a.m. – Write down your to-do list of top priorities and plan out your day

9:30 a.m. – 11:00 a.m. – Begin drafting a client document based on your notes from last week’s meeting.

11:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. – Meet with your internal team, add more priorities to your to-do list.

12:00 p.m. – 1:00 p.m. – Lunch. Jot down notes from your team meeting and make a memo to update your to-do list.

1:00 p.m. – Re-order your day based on new priorities and items from the team meeting, update your schedule and to-do list.

2:00 p.m. – Begin an outline of the team presentation discussed in today’s meeting.

3:00 p.m. – Continue to work on the draft of the client document and prep for today’s management meeting.

4:00 p.m. – One last meeting of the day with the management team.

5:00 p.m. – Wrap up for the day and drive home.

6:00 p.m. – Make notes from the management meeting for the recap and jot down a few priorities for tomorrow.

Now, let’s take another look and see if there are some places for us to get some time back in our day:

7:00 a.m. – Wake up and get ready for the day. Use your phone’s dictation app to record your to-do list and the day’s priorities, automatically saving them to the cloud as you go.

8:00 a.m. – Drive to work and access your dictation app again, start talking through and recording a rough outline for the client document that you plan to work on today.

9:00 a.m. – 11:00 a.m. – Get into work and review the list of priorities you recorded earlier, which have been uploaded to the cloud. Write and finalise the first draft of the client document based on your voice notes from the car.

10:30 a.m. – 11:00 a.m. – Begin work on the spreadsheet for next month’s accounting numbers.

11:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. – Meet with your internal team. Add more priorities to your to-do list with your dictation app, adjusting priority levels right from your phone. Record the team meeting and send the audio file from your phone to your transcription service to transcribe the minutes.

12:00 p.m. – 1:00 p.m. – Lunch.

1:00 p.m. – Review the meeting notes sent over by the transcription service, including the outline of the team presentation discussed in the meeting.

1:30 p.m. – 2:30 p.m. – Build out the presentation draft based on your transcribed notes. Send an initial copy to your team for review.

2:30 p.m. – 3:30 p.m. – Make a few more updates to next month’s spreadsheet, proofread and send the client document you worked on earlier over for review.

3:30 p.m. – Prep for the management meeting, begin making tomorrow’s priorities list.

4:00 p.m. – One last meeting of the day with the management team.

5:00 p.m. – Drive home, dictating your notes from today’s management meeting, in the safe knowledge that they will be instantly converted to text for you to review when you are back in the office.

6:00 p.m. – Relax.

How to accomplish more

As we can see, by incorporating voice technology into the average day, our professional not only accomplished much more, but was also able to relax at the end of the day, knowing that they’d gotten ahead of their to-do list thanks to dictation time savings.

No one wants to feel overwhelmed or like they’ve lost time in their day. By taking advantage of new technologies and making your time work for you, not against you, we can all get a little more done, while still getting some more time back in our day.

Where does your time go? What are your most time-consuming projects and how can you save time and automate those tasks?