You will apply the matrix and your three priorities to a full week of work and see where your time goes.
Ask most people where their week went and they will give you a rough answer: "lots of meetings", "mostly emails", "the client thing ate everything". Ask them to put hours against it and the answer usually changes. The meetings took fewer hours than it felt, and the small messages took far more.
This exercise replaces the rough answer with a measured one. You will rebuild last week from the records you already have, sort it into the four boxes from lesson 1.2, Do, schedule, delegate or drop, and check how much of it served the three priorities you found in lesson 1.3. Set aside about 25 minutes, with your calendar, email and chat apps open.
Memory is a poor witness for a whole week, so lean on records. Meetings and blocked time are in your calendar. Sent email and chat history tell you what you replied to and roughly when, and an old to-do list shows what got crossed off. If you have never opened your phone's screen time report, open it now; it keeps a week of app use.
Go day by day, Monday to Friday, and write each chunk of work as a line with a rough number of hours, rounded to the nearest half hour. An hour that was "probably 45 minutes" is fine written as 1, because you are looking for the shape of the week rather than an exact count.
Include the small stuff in groups. You won't remember each of 60 chat replies, but you can estimate "chat replies and quick questions, about an hour a day".
Draw up a simple sheet on paper or in a spreadsheet with these columns: the task, the hours, the box (urgent and important, important not urgent, urgent not important, neither), and which of your three priorities it served, if any.
Fill in the box column for every line. Then total the hours in each box.
Now go back through the lines and tick each one that served one of your three priorities. A line can serve one priority, or none. Total those hours separately for each priority.
This is where the sheet starts to tell you something. Important work and priority work overlap but are not the same. A health appointment is important and serves none of your work priorities, which is fine. A three-hour meeting about a project in your priority list counts, even if half of it felt slow.
Here is Priya's week, the marketing executive from lesson 1.2. The hours are an example, and her working week was 45 hours.
Urgent and important came to 6 hours: a pricing error on the website she had to correct with the e-commerce team, and the manager's deck. Important but not urgent came to 9 hours: the campaign brief, an hour of her analytics course and a planning session with the agency. Urgent but not important came to 21 hours: meetings where she listened but did not contribute, ad hoc requests from other departments, approvals and around 7 hours of email and chat. Neither came to 9 hours, mostly checking channels and inboxes between other work, plus a report she now suspects nobody reads.
Her total is 6 + 9 + 21 + 9 = 45 hours, so nothing is missing. The urgent but not important box took 21 of 45 hours, close to half her week.
Her three priorities from lesson 1.3 were the year-end campaign, the monthly performance report for her manager, and building her analytics skills. When she went back through the lines, 7 hours had gone to the campaign, 2 to the report and 1 to her course. So 10 hours out of 45, about 22 percent, went on what her role is judged on.
That number is not a grade. It is a starting point you can compare against in week four of the final project.
Look at the urgent but not important box and find the one recurring task that takes the most time or causes the most interruptions. Then choose one of the moves from lesson 1.2: batch it, shorten it, delegate it or push back on it.
Priya chose the ad hoc requests from other departments, which came in through Teams at any time of day and cost her about 4 hours across the week. She decided to batch them: she would answer them in a 30-minute slot at 2pm and 5pm, and she would ask her manager whether the most common type, requests for past campaign figures, could go into a shared folder that people could check themselves.
Keep your choice to one task. Changing five things at once means you won't know which change worked, and you are more likely to drop all of them by Wednesday.
When you're done, you have a single page showing your week as hours in four boxes, hours against each of your three priorities, and one line saying which task you will change next week and how. Hold on to that page, because you will use it in lesson 3.4 to plan a week from start to finish, and again in lesson 4.1 to label your work as deep or shallow.
Now fill in your own week, line by line, and write down the one task you will cut or batch.
Complete the weekly time map template with hours per box and per priority, and write the one task you will cut or batch next week.
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