How to find the repetitive tasks eating your team's hours: a one week time audit

Why hours are the number that matters

You pay for every hour your team works, whether that hour wins a client or copies a phone number from WhatsApp into a CRM. Repeat work is the part of the salary that buys typing, copying and chasing.

Take one person who spends 10 hours a week on repeat tasks, at AED 45 an hour. That is AED 450 a week, AED 1,950 a month and AED 23,400 a year, for one person. Most owners never see that number, because repeat work hides in dozens of small moments of five or ten minutes. A time audit adds them up.

Step 1: choose one person and one normal week

Start with the person who complains most about admin, or the role you are about to hire more of. Pick a normal week. Avoid month end, public holidays, a launch or anything else unusual, because you want the hours that repeat every week.

Step 2: list the repeat tasks

Sit with the person for 20 minutes and ask:

• What do you type more than three times a day?
• What do you copy from one screen to another?
• Who do you chase every week, and for what?
• Which report or update do you build by hand?
• What do you send to customers that is almost the same every time?

The person doing the work knows where the hours go. A manager's guess is usually wrong in both directions.

Step 3: log the minutes for one week

Use a simple sheet with one row per task. Every time the task happens, add a tally. At the end of the week, multiply.

This is an example log for one person. Your tasks and numbers will be different.

Step 4: put a price on the hours

Work out what an hour of that person costs: their fully loaded monthly cost (salary, allowances and the other costs of employing them) divided by their working hours in a month. Then:

Monthly cost of repeat work = hours per week × cost per hour × 52 ÷ 12

In the example, 9.8 hours a week at AED 45 an hour is about AED 1,920 a month, or about AED 23,000 a year, for one person. The full method, including payback, is in how to calculate what repeat work costs your team.

Step 5: rank what to automate first

High hours and clear rules go first. Tasks that need judgement stay with the person. If you are unsure, use the scoring test in what to automate first.

Step 6: measure again after automation

Two weeks after the automation goes live, run the same log for the same person. Hours given back is the before total minus the after total. Multiply by the cost per hour and you have the money, in AED, that the automation returned. That before and after count is the only honest proof that automation worked.

Common mistakes

• Auditing from memory. People underestimate small, frequent tasks.
• Picking an unusual week. You will automate the wrong things.
• Counting judgement work. Negotiation and difficult conversations are not repeat work.
• Auditing the manager's view. Ask the person who does the work.
• Stopping at the audit. A list of wasted hours saves nothing until one task is automated.