Time Tracking and Analysis

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.

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.

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

Time tracking always gets a bad rap. I don’t agree. Anyone who hates it thinks it’s a form of micromanaging. But I see it as radical transparency. Time tracking is a conversation starter, not a measuring stick. It helps you learn what’s happening in your business so you can help your top performers avoid burnout, help under-performing team members get the training they need, and be more efficient with your client work.  Just one example: the best people on your team probably get the most work. And then… Things start falling apart. Your top performers want the extra responsibilities, but they don’t have the bandwidth to do it all. So they end up burning out and leaving a big gap at your company. As a founder, you need to protect their time like the success of your company depends on it — because in many ways, it does. You need to make sure you don’t pile on more when they’re already working 12-hour days. The trouble is, knowing what each team member’s bandwidth looks like is often easier said than done. When I was building Levvy to help with so many of my own challenges as a firm owner, there was a risk that adding time tracking would make employees feel like they were being micromanaged… even if the practice did give managers full visibility and help them assign tasks in a smarter way. But this was such a pain point for the firm owners I knew (and for myself at my CAS practice), that I decided it was worth incorporating. Turns out, that visibility was more appreciated than I could’ve ever anticipated. The employees who were often assigned the most critical projects stopped getting overbooked and overloaded with deadlines. It became easier to identify team members who needed extra guidance, support, and training, too — so they could grow over time and take on more of that critical work themselves. It’s one of those things that seems so simple on the surface, but is tough to achieve with the day-to-day realities of running a firm. Curious how other firm owners are approaching time tracking right now. If you’ve done it, what’s been your team’s response?

Time tracking shouldn’t feel like surveillance. But in a lot of agencies, it does. If your team dreads logging hours, you’re probably not getting good data. Or much buy-in from your team. I talked to agency leaders and consultants who’ve been there and figured out how to make time tracking actually work. Not just for billing, but for: • Forecasting capacity • Improving workflows • Preventing burnout In this piece for Scoro, we get into: → How to reframe time tracking as a tool for support, not control → Tips for a smoother rollout (even with skeptical teams) → What to do with the data once you collect it Huge thanks to the experts who shared their first-hand experience: Ray Slater Berry, John Doherty, Manish Kapur, Tetiana Kovalyova, Harv Nagra, and Marcel Petitpas. Read the full article for 11 time tracking best practices + expert insights 👇