Uncomfortable but important revelations from Time Tracking (Refresh Your Life The Lazy Way Series)

This is the transcript of The Refreshing Leadership Podcast episode: Uncomfortable but important revelations from Time Tracking (Refresh Your Life The Lazy Way Series), published on 5th October 2026.

Since the last episode a week ago, I hope you've had a good week. But here's a question: do you know where your time actually went last week? Not roughly where you think it went, but if I asked you to account for your waking hours, do you think you could do it?

Because I couldn't.

I've known for many years now that tracking time is one of the most revealing exercises you can do. I take this from Laura Vanderkam, who has been a guest on this podcast and I've been a guest on hers. She's written extensively about time tracking in her various books, and her latest one, Big Time, is a must-read in my opinion.

What I take from Laura's writing on this is that we often tell ourselves stories about our lives. We might tell ourselves we don't see our kids often enough, or that we work too much, or that we have no free time, or that we hardly do any exercise, or that we do too much admin. But it's only when you actually monitor your time that you get the true picture.

With time in particular, because there are so many increments in a week - 168 hours, or in half-hour chunks, double that - our brain is going to struggle to account for all of that as it goes about its other activities. That's why we need to do it intentionally.

The other thing I know from my work and research is that monitoring is the most critical principle in behaviour change. So if we did want to realign the way we spend our time, monitoring is the first step in that process. This comes up in lots of other areas too. If you want to improve your posture, actually monitoring it over the course of the day is one of the first ways to do that. Tracking food is important if you're trying to improve your nutrition. And until we have an accurate record, we can't really think about the kind of changes we want to make, because our brain is likely to misread the situation and rely on those stories instead.

How I set up time tracking with ChatGPT

I have attempted to time track off the back of what Laura shares, and maybe I'd manage a day or two, but I'm just not built that way. Some people will be naturally very good at it - she's done it for ten years. Certain personality types will take to it, and others, like me, will struggle.

That's where AI came in to the rescue. I'm currently using ChatGPT extensively, and I found a setup that really works for me. I thought it might be helpful to share my steps so that if you want to give this a go, you can set it up quickly and maybe avoid some of the issues I had initially - so that you might be able to time track this week before the next episode. If you have your time tracked, next week's episode is going to make a lot more sense.

The first thing I did was set up a separate project in ChatGPT - a dedicated time tracking project - so that it had one place to collate everything.

As somebody who likes to listen rather than look at a screen, I like the idea of pressing the microphone and speaking into it rather than typing or writing everything out by hand. Writing by hand would be therapeutic, but I've tried it, and it's just impossible to organise on a daily basis. It does need to be digitally captured, but this way I don't have to type it in accurately myself. I can just ramble into ChatGPT and it captures it for me.

That removed a huge amount of friction, especially because I had certain points in the day when I was on the move. Maybe I was going for a walk or moving from A to B, and I found it much easier at those moments to just speak into the chat with the latest update on what I'd been doing. Or if I sat down at my desk, I could open the same project on my desktop version and capture it that way.

The other useful thing was that it didn't matter if I wasn't very consistent. If there had been a five-hour gap, I could just say, "I know this happened from this time, and then roughly I did the following." It's much easier to ramble that into ChatGPT and have it summarise sufficiently, without me having to do the mental work of categorising everything myself. That's the difference between being able to track my time and not tracking it at all.

I did also give it some detailed instructions, because ChatGPT was making some mistakes. These included things like: "If you find yourself about to summarise, analyse, or comment on my time, please don't. This is about maintaining the log exactly as recorded. The purpose of this chat is to create an accurate historical record of how I spent my time. This is the master log. Every time I give an update, please append it to the master log." For a while it wasn't realising that each update needed to be added to that day's log, so I needed to clarify that.

Initially I was also asking for it to be formatted in a way that could be easily pasted into Excel, but that turned out not to be necessary because I just pasted the whole set of notes back into ChatGPT for analysis - which is what we're going to look at now.

What I actually found when I analysed my time logs

Before we went away to Ibiza, I had been on a real roll with my time tracking. I was managing it most days. Then the trip came along, I never really found my groove again, and I felt like there were constant disruptions. I've arguably been out of routine for a couple of months, and I wonder whether now, with a bit more of a consistent routine, might be a better time to start again.

I'm not saying that with full conviction though. It's easy to say weekends and holidays don't count - but actually they make up huge chunks of our time, so we shouldn't be discounting them.

Anyway, I managed to track 16 days. I copied and pasted those into Notes each day once they were done, and then I did absolutely nothing with them. I was just proud of myself for having tracked. As I prepared for this episode, I went back and put all that data into ChatGPT to be analysed. Sarah Hart-Unger, Laura Vanderkam's podcast partner, talks about finding it helpful to do the analysis using an LLM, and I think it is really worth going through what the findings were.

What I'm sharing now is mainly ChatGPT's analysis. Here's what it found.

Time with family and relationships was enormous. On one particular Monday, it calculated more than six and a half hours of family time - and that was on a day that also had three hours of health and fitness activity. I had done a walk, some strength training, and probably my dance class that day.

Home and garden was a serious allocation. This was a particular phase - the weather was amazing, so in the evenings after dinner I was just in the garden endlessly. ChatGPT noted one block of almost four hours in the garden. Other days had blocks of two hours, two and a half hours. This was peak gardening time, and I was basically allocating massive chunks of time to it.

I had more downtime than I remembered. There was leisure and recovery in the logs. There was a Saturday where I managed to have a nap, and another weekend with time watching TV. Coffee outside, TV and films, reading, sitting around, getting ready. There was one evening where I had done an hour walk with somebody and then about four hours of leisure and downtime afterwards. I don't think I would personally have remembered any of that, but the data was there.

There was quite a lot of clothes admin during a specific phase when I was preparing for the Ibiza trip - trying things on, sorting outfits, returning things, working out what went with what. I have a sort of love-hate relationship with that, because it actually really helped me for the rest of the summer.

Whenever I had to go out in the evenings, I never had to worry about what to wear because I'd already done that investment of time. But it was definitely showing up in the logs.

Work was a relatively small proportion of those tracked days. There were coaching calls, some podcast work, business development, finance and admin. But we're talking about a few hours. One Monday was showing an hour and a half of business development and then other admin. These 16 days were not capturing a huge amount of work.

That's actually interesting for two reasons. One is that financially, this is my best year ever. So if I look at the hours I'm putting into work versus the income, that's working out very well for me. On the other hand, the less positive part is that I don't think I'm putting enough time into my work compared to what I'd like to do with it. There are things I'd like to do that I'm not getting round to because I'm diverting myself with all these other things. And whilst past investments in my work are now paying off, there'll probably come a time when that's not the case and I'll need to invest more time.

I also found my 2021 goals recently and looked at them and thought: "You were full of beans then, Maya." I had a lot of goals and I got a lot of them done. I just don't have that same drive as I approach 45 that I did then. I'm not sure that's always necessary though - I think we have investment periods in our work and careers. But it was a really, really useful finding.

What's coming next week

This is where it gets really interesting, and we're going to take this into next week's episode.

If you could have a go at doing some time tracking - even roughly on a scrap of paper, or using ChatGPT if you already talk to it regularly - next week we're going to look at our allocation across different areas of life. Where might we be over-concentrated? Where are we getting the benefits of compounding? All of that.

What I realised as I was planning these episodes was that it was really important to do this one first. By doing the time tracking, you see categories that perhaps you didn't even know were important. That's going to be much more telling than doing it the other way around.

If you're unconvinced about why to time track, I highly encourage you to read Big Time by Laura Vanderkam. And if you want tips on how to do it, I really hope that with LLMs, you can now make something that was quite onerous before a lot easier.

If you know somebody who feels like they're always busy, or who has narratives about their time like "I never have enough," send them this episode so they can have a go at time tracking themselves.

I look forward to connecting with you next time.

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About Maya

Maya Gudka is an executive coach specialising in C-suite career progression and leadership development. She works with senior leaders in major organisations on strategic career planning, executive presence, and building sustainable influence. Maya hosts The Refreshing Leadership Podcast, which ranks in the top 2% of podcasts globally and has nearly 300 episodes exploring the challenges faced by ambitious professionals.