Okay, let's dive into lesson one of the second module schedule analysis. This lesson is all about getting a clear idea of where your timelines actually going. Now, in order to accomplish that, we're going to cover three different things in this lesson. First, you're going to take a realistic look at your current schedule. The reason we start with a time audit is because we need to get a clear picture of where your time is really going right now, and not where you think it's going. I'm going to make a bold statement here and say that I have a feeling you're wasting at least a couple of hours a week, just because you aren't paying attention to what you're focusing on.

That statement may or may not apply to you. But by the end of this lesson, we're going to know for sure, after you have a more accurate picture of where your time is really going, we're going to evaluate the activities you engage in every week. I find that most working parents are reacting to their schedules much more than they're actually in control of their schedules, which is clearly backwards. We're going Take the first steps to turn that around in this lesson. And finally, I'm going to work with you to start breaking your schedule down into two different categories, essential activities and trivial activities. Understanding the difference between these two types of activities is going to help you answer that question you probably have every day of your life.

How do I know what to focus on? The biggest complaint I hear from working parents is I don't have enough time. I bet you've even said it yourself. That's probably why you got this program in the first place. And that's the problem that we're going to solve for you in Module Two. We're going to dive deep into your schedule and ask the following questions.

Number one, what are you spending your time on right now? Number two, where could you be saving your time? And three, what activities really aren't that important to you anymore? Before we can answer those questions, though, we need to do a time audit. A time audit is just an inventory of your time that you'll take over a week long period. So you can do this in two different ways.

The first is to track your time over the course of a week. Or you can estimate where your time is going based on your general schedule in normal weekly activities. The most ideal way for you to do your time audit is to track your time as closely as closely as possible for about a week, and then fill in any gaps based on what you typically do to get the most accurate picture possible. So I want to challenge you to commit to trying to track your time over the next seven days. I know some of you may be impatient, or you might forget. So if that happens, go ahead and just fill in the different time blocks on the exercise based on your recollection over the last week.

So this exercise is really straightforward. But we're going to talk about a couple of different success tips to make sure that you get the most out of this lesson. So first, I don't want you to wait until you have a normal week to start your time on it. You'll always have random activities popping up throughout your week. That's just life. That's okay.

Go ahead and just start now even if you know that you're going to have some uncommon activities going on this week, you can always do another log another time to continue to get a better view of your time. But the most important thing is that you just kind of do it, let's get a baseline. Another tip is to print out the worksheets and take them with you throughout the week. I don't know about you, but my memory is pretty terrible these days. So if I don't write something down, it's gone from my head pretty quickly. Keep the tracking sheets on you as much as you can and fill them out every hour as much as possible.

Set a timer if you need to, but keep trying to fill it in as you go throughout your day. You can also combine the two time audit options to get the best results. So I mentioned this a little earlier, but you don't have to choose between the time tracker and estimated time audit, you can go ahead and use both to get a super thorough look at your time. Again, the more complete and accurate your time log is the more you're going to get out of this module as we go through this exercise There are a couple of potential pitfalls I want you to avoid. The first is waiting to get started, like I just mentioned, you'll never have one week that looks exactly like all the others. So don't worry too much about finding an accurate representation of your of your week.

Go ahead and just get started. Also, don't try to go back and fill everything in at the end of the day. Do you remember everything you do in a day? I don't. That's it's too hard for me. So it's easy to forget exactly how much time we spend browsing online or hanging out with a friend on our lunch break, or how much time we actually took spending.

We actually spent cooking dinner. So go back going back at the end of the day to fill in your time law log might mean a less accurate log for you which isn't going to be quite as helpful. The last potential pitfall I want you to avoid is trying to create a perfect time log. So trying to make your log look perfect isn't the goal here. Accuracy beats perfection. Don't try to avoid certain behaviors just because you don't want to Login.

For example, if you typically spend an hour before bread beds scrolling through your Facebook feed, it's no problem. Go ahead and just live as normally as possible. And be honest about what you're really spending your time on. There are no judgments here, and no one else is even going to see your log. So don't worry about how it looks. We'll be making changes later if there's something that you don't like about what you're spending your time on.

So don't try and make it look perfect. Now just make it look real. So now I want to recommend one of the best books that I've actually read. And it's one of the books that's changed my life as a working parent. So I know that's a bold statement, but it's absolutely true. So the book is called essentialism, the disciplined pursuit of less by Greg McCown.

And when I was a new working parent, I was kind of doing all sorts of research. I was trying to figure out how to make this work because it seemed impossible to me at the time. And when I read this book, it got me to start thinking differently about my time instead of trying to fit in as much as possible in My schedule, I was motivated to start evaluating what I spent my time on. And I started saying no to everything that wasn't absolutely essential. So, before I read this book, I kind of just I thought of time management as trying to work faster and harder and getting as much as possible packed into, you know, an eight hour workday, or 24 hour period. But that was driving me insane.

I mean, I just kept working faster and faster, and the pressure just kept building and building and eventually I hit a wall. So I guess I never even realized before that saying yes to everything in my life, what was was what was causing me so much stress. And it's nice to get permission from someone to actually start pruning the non essential activities from your life and that's what this book did for me. So that's why I wanted to share it with you here. Okay, so that's it for me for this lesson. Go ahead and download your next exercise, which is the time audit exercise.

Take the next week and try to track as much of your time as you possibly can remember that the more accurately your time log is, the more you're going to work with or the more that you're going to have to work with in our next few lessons. So go ahead and download your time on it and I will see you in lesson two