Time Tracking and Analysis

We found $1.4 million sitting on the floor. Lost to administrative friction. I was working with a firm of 50 attorneys. Real estate litigation. Good lawyers. Busy practice. When we audited their time tracking, we found 30 to 50 billable hours disappearing across the firm every week. It was not the big work. Briefs get billed. Motions get billed. The four-hour research session gets billed. It was the emails. The quick client email that took twelve minutes. The three-message thread with opposing counsel. The follow-up that did not feel worth stopping to log. Multiplied by 50 attorneys. Multiplied by 52 weeks. At their billing rates, the math was brutal. Here is what we did. We installed AI-powered passive time tracking. It runs in the background, captures activity across email and documents, and builds draft time entries automatically. Attorneys review and approve. They do not log. The time that used to disappear now shows up in the report. Most firms I work with have never run this calculation. They know time slips through. They just do not know where — or how much. If you bill hourly and your team tracks time manually, this is worth calculating. The number is usually worse than you expect. PS: Does your firm have a time tracking problem or a time capturing problem? They are not the same thing.

Every day, the professional services industry wastes 2,000 years of collective time. Not on client work. On timekeeping. That's $7.4 billion in lost productivity—every single day. And here's the paradox: Timekeeping is mandatory. It's highly incentivized (billable targets). It's directly tied to compensation. And yet firms still leave $250 billion on the table annually because of how time is tracked. Why? Because manual time tracking is fundamentally broken. Memory fades. Entries get approximated. Work falls through the cracks. Laurel solves this at the root. Our AI agent captures digital work across every application—emails, documents, calls, meetings, research—automatically. Then it translates that work into billable time entries. The impact: → +0.48 hours captured per fee-earner daily → $23,500 annual revenue recovered per timekeeper → 83% reduction in time spent on timesheets → Bills submitted 3.5 days faster This isn't about making timekeeping easier. It's about making timekeeping disappear—while capturing every minute of value. The firms that understand this are winning. The rest are still asking people to remember what they did last Tuesday.

Time tracking data is more powerful than most teams realize. Beyond recording hours, It tells a deeper story… - How movement shapes financial outcomes - How people spend their time - How workloads shift ClickTime’s latest piece explores how time tracking data strengthens multi-year financial models, turning past activity into foresight for better decisions. Here’s how it works in practice: 1. Identify seasonality with precision Analyzing 24–36 months of time data helps you uncover monthly trends across departments or service lines. 2. Translate seasonality into costs Those insights let you align labor demand with direct costs, creating a forecast that reflects actual operating rhythm. 3. Link time data to revenue When time data meets sales data, you can model billable capacity and revenue seasonality with far greater accuracy. 4. Account for variability Time data also highlights ranges, not just averages. Building buffer scenarios from this variance prepares your forecast for uncertainty. The result is a model that reflects how your business truly operates not an idealized version of it. Because accurate forecasting doesn’t eliminate uncertainty; It helps you navigate it. Read the full article on ClickTime → https://lnkd.in/e2E4SCWv

When I was an Analyst at Goldman Sachs I worked countless hours and sleepless nights. Today’s “Protected Saturday” policies would have been met with a scoff. My bosses had no clue how I was spending my time. Frankly, neither did I.  We had to fill out high-level timesheets - a vague compliance checkbox everyone completed half-heartedly… So I built my own in Excel. An hour-by-hour granular breakdown of how I was spending time. The pie charts and time series data gave me a handle on exactly where I created value (or not) and a way to communicate it upward. Today I no longer need that kind of self-auditing (though I’m sure some would beg to differ), but the insight remains: you can’t optimize what you don’t quantify. One of Laurel’s professional services clients discovered their senior project leaders were spending 14% of their time formatting PowerPoints. You don’t find that in a timesheet. If British Petroleum uncovered a 1% oil-refinement gain, it’d transform their earnings. In professional services, massive inefficiencies pass unnoticed. So much of supply chains is human - time, attention, judgment - yet we still manage it with 1990s tools at best. Laurel’s shared data highlights just a glimpse of the possible.  Their AI system can turn time into structured, observable, and analyzable data: an unprecedented enterprise intelligence unlock. From 2,000+ professionals across law and accounting, their latest report found: → 30% of all work time, roughly 3 hours a day, goes unrecorded, distorting revenue and capacity planning. →  Professionals get just 15 minutes of uninterrupted focus during the day. → Firms adopting AI time solutions recover an average of 28 minutes of missed billable time, that’s $37,000 annually per professional (!). Hard supply chains are engineered, refined, simulated, and stress-tested to the inch and the second. [There are entire expert organizations like Kearney that specialize in supply chain analysis and optimization.] However, understanding and optimizing knowledge work is still largely guesswork disguised as process. To address the other 50% of the economy, we need to do what no time tracking, consultancy, or BI dashboard has done: accurately map, quantify, and analyze the physics of time and work. Check out the full report → https://lnkd.in/gSFqbBHf Full disclosure: ACME Capital is an early investor in Laurel.

I recently received a brilliant tip from a C-suite executive: their former Executive Assistant conducted quarterly time audits, tracking how the executive's time was allocated and discussing the findings together. This approach provided valuable insights into time management and helped optimize productivity. Implementing such time audits can be a game-changer. By analyzing time spent, executives can identify areas for improvement, ensuring alignment with strategic goals. For instance, tracking the balance between internal meetings and external engagements can reveal if adjustments are needed to enhance effectiveness. There are various methods for conducting these audits, ranging from manual tracking to utilizing specialized tools. Some Executive Assistants use spreadsheets to log activities, while others leverage software that integrates with calendars to automate the process. The key is to choose a system that fits seamlessly into your workflow. I'm curious to hear from others: Executives, Chiefs of Staff, and Executive Assistants: Do you implement similar time-tracking practices? If so, what methods have you found effective, and what impact has it had on your productivity and time management? #ExecutiveAssistant #TimeManagement #Productivity #Leadership #steelerecruiting #chiefofstaff #CEO

I did a time audit yesterday 🕒 Every 15 minutes, I wrote down what I was doing — no matter how small or messy. Not just to track productivity… But to evaluate my energy and calculate the real value of the tasks I was doing. Here’s what I learned: 🕒I put in ~9.5 hours of work, but nearly 40% of my time went to tasks that didn’t truly move the needle 🕒 My highest-value work — strategy, growth, and driving results — only took up a small slice of the day 🕒 I was spending too much time on internal coordination, back-and-forth in Slack, and task switching — things that should be systemized or delegated The kicker? A lot of that stuff didn’t just cost me time — it drained my energy and momentum. This exercise was inspired by the Buy Back Your Time framework — and damn, it delivered. If you’ve been feeling like a bottleneck, or just stuck in the weeds, try it: ✅ Track every 15 minutes for a day or two ✅ Rate your energy and assign a dollar value to the task ✅ See what’s draining you — and what needs to go If it doesn’t give me energy or generate ROI — it gets delegated, automated, or deleted. That’s the new rule.

Not knowing where your time is going is killing your productivity: Here's a 3-step method to stop wasting Time (I built & tested it over 3 years.) It’s helped me: • Publish weekly fiction for 3 years. • Create a Writing course. • Write daily on LinkedIn While holding a full-time job and being a university student. Step 1) Create a Time Log This forces accountability + awareness. You can't hide what you're doing with your time. Each week has 168 hrs. Break each day into 15 min or 30 min blocks. Set a reminder to record the activity for that block. Do this for 1 month & you'll know where your time goes. (Snag my time log template for free in the comments) --- Step 2) Prioritize values Look at your time log. Ask yourself: • Is this where I want my time going? • What are your top 3 values in life right now? Productivity is about making time for what you value. Not about squeezing work into each hour of the day. --- Step 3) Focus Management We have 24 hours in a day. It’s not about the hours you put in. But what you put in the hours. I use 3 tools to help me focus; 1. Google Calendar -- for Tracking. 2. Google Tasks -- for Scheduling. 3. A Timer -- for Working. --- 3 Easy steps to regain your time. PS: If you want your own time log tracker, I'll link mine in the comments below!

If we’re not careful, we can easily lose track of not just hours but for sure days and even entire weeks. A phone call here, a fire there and before we finally catch our breath, time seems to have slipped away. One of my favorite activities to get some visibility and ultimately find more time is a time tracking exercise. Here’s exactly what to do: Step 1: Track Your Time I recommend tracking your time for a minimum of two weeks. The increments you use can be ones that are most meaningful to you and your tasks. I recommend tracking time in no shorter than 15 minutes increments, especially when you’re first starting out with this system. In terms of tools, you can use whatever is most readily available to you and what you feel comfortable with. I’m a huge fan of pen or pencil and paper on this one but you can just as easily implement a SAAS tool like Tyme. Step 2: Analyze Your Time This is where you get to learn about and make decisions on the tasks you love to do and the tasks that drain you of energy. Here are the 3 questions you should be asking: What tasks do I love doing? What tasks are time wasters? What tasks do I hate doing? You want to take all the data you have gathered at this point and look for patterns while you’re asking yourself those 3 questions. Create a list of items that you hate doing and that are time wasters for you. These will be the easiest and fastest to start delegating. Step 3: Eliminate, Delegate, and Automate People laugh when I tell them to stop doing the “time wasters,” especially if they’re in middle management. It’s my way of “testing” if requests are necessary and utilized or just a function of “that’s what we’ve always done.” When it comes to delegation, I often hear from leaders that it’s easier to do it themselves versus following up on individual tasks and projects. But that’s where tracking tasks comes in. The goal here is to create a feedback loop so that you as the leader know that a particular task has been completed. This will be different for each of the tasks you delegate but ask yourself, what type of cue would I like to see to know this has been completed? This step removes the need for constant follow-up and creates a signal to you that something has been completed. How about giving this a try this week? #operationalexcellence #changemanagement #continuousimprovement