111 - The CEO Time Audit
Most CEOs are unaware of how they spend their time or what it’s truly worth. This episode introduces the CEO Time Audit: a simple tool to track time, classify task value, and refocus energy on high-leverage growth work.
The CEO Time Audit
Most entrepreneurs believe the next level of growth comes from a new hire, a new product, or a new system. But often, it starts with a far simpler move: Tracking how you spend your time.
This episode introduces a tool every growth-focused CEO should use: The CEO Time Audit.
It’s not just about productivity. It’s about aligning your time with the true value of your role.
Key insights from the episode:
1. Track everything for five days.
Write down every activity across five business days. Don’t judge or filter. Just document. This creates the raw data you’ll use to make real changes.
2. Categorise by function.
Each activity gets mapped to one of four categories:
Operations, Client Delivery, Sales, or Strategic Growth. This step reveals where your time is being spent and what your business is missing.
3. Assign a value to tasks.
For each activity, assign a value range:
• Low Value: €100 tasks
• Mid Value: €1,000–€10,000 tasks
• High Value: €10,000+ tasks (owner-only decisions and strategic growth work)
4. Eliminate, Delegate, Automate.
Once categorised, take action:
• Eliminate what adds no value
• Delegate anything below your pay grade
• Automate recurring tasks where possible
5. Unlock growth time
The goal isn’t to free up time randomly; it’s to create focused blocks for high-value work. Aim for 20% of your week to be spent on strategic growth.
Final Insight:
Time isn’t your constraint; your focus is. When you treat your time like capital, you stop managing the present and start building the future.
This episode provides a method to reclaim your calendar, restructure your role, and scale with intention.
Timecode:
00:00 Introduction to CEO Time Audit
00:26 Understanding High and Low Value Tasks
01:02 Importance of Strategic Time Allocation
01:24 Steps to Conduct a CEO Time Audit
01:42 Categorizing and Delegating Tasks
02:16 Implementing the Time Audit with Your Team
02:43 Conclusion and Benefits of the CEO Time Audit
Links:
Website: https://www.marcogrueter.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcogrueter/
Transcript:
A very simple tool, but something I use a lot and people don't believe what they get out of it is the CEO time audit. And very often business owners, CEOs that work in their job day in in day out, they don't see what they're actually working on that would give value or things they work on that doesn't give value, or it's just, let's say, very low value.
The point we do this because you need to be clear on how much you spend on high value task, how much you spend on low value task. You need to know is it time spent in operations management, in client delivery, in sales or strategic business growing activities. So these four things are super key to understand, and it's not if it's good or bad, it's more about being really present with where you spend your time.
We all like to work on the most pressing things. We like to work on firefights. Uh, this is just normal human because then we feel most alive. But being strategic is not about this. Being strategic is have enough time to grow your company and it's at least 20% of your time goes into growth time. So therefore, you need to eliminate if you work too much on operations, for instance, or too much in sales, which is nice for a lot of business owners.
But it's not what actually brings your company forward. So the CEO timer is very simple. For five days, you take all your activities, note them down. You do categorize it in one of these different business functions like operation, sales, strategic growth, and then you decide what was the task you were working on.
Is it a low value task, like a hundred euro task? Is it like a medium? Like a thousand to 10,000 or is it 10,000 plus the high value task and things you only you can do as that business owner and these things you want to focus and all the rest you want to delegate. Um, and you start normally with eliminate first, right?
Everything you can element is best thing. Then the other thing is delegate, and the next thing is automate. So this is what you wanna do with all go through with all of the activities for one week. Ideally do it with your management team as well, and everything that comes out there gives you a lot of work for a few weeks to adjust.
Imagine you get up one week and you have about 10 hours to work on your future of the future of the company. This has so much more power than trying to sneak in one hour here, one hour there, and you normally don't get it because you don't plan it and you, you're not aware. So the Zero timeout is, is a, for me, a very simple. Always, uh, mind opening or eye-opening tool. Uh, I love to, uh, work through with, with entrepreneurs.