Do you know how many hours you work each week and what that equates to in terms of hourly value? While it’s not a great business model to trade your time for money, when you can identify areas of high productivity, you can leverage that into more profits. Hopefully, you can leverage it into more time too.

A Self-Assessment

The first step to creating a super productive work schedule requires an honest self-assessment. Because most people tend to over, or under, estimate their time and productivity it’s important to skip the guess work. The goal is to accurately assess how long certain tasks take you to complete. For example, maybe you believe you only spend an hour a day on email. However, the intermittent checks from your phone and laptop may actually add up to several hours.

The first step therefor is to track your time for about a week. This can feel tedious but stick with it. When you start a task or project, note the time you start and the time you finish. At the end of the day, tally it all up. Also consider tracking the income from profit generating tasks. For example, checking email doesn’t generate any income but working on and delivering a client project or a coaching session both result in payment.

Identify Your Moods

Pay attention to your moods throughout the week. For example, maybe you start each week feeling motivated and productive. By the end of the week it’s all you can do is get dressed. This is important information. It means that you probably shouldn’t schedule important tasks on Friday. In fact, maybe take the entire day off.

Busy Times

Pay attention to your month. For example, at the end of the month are you busy with client deadlines? Do you have contractors delivering items at the beginning of the month? It makes sense to look at how your month generally flows.

Pulling it All Together

You now have a grocery list of information. What to do with it? Identify the productive times of your week, the slow times of your month, and how you feel during the week. When do you feel most productive?

All of the information you’ve gathered creates a framework. You can see when you have the potential to be productive and when life is likely to get in the way. Set aside the best productivity times for your most important work. And don’t forget to take some time off to stay productive and happy.