Where Your Week Actually Goes

Ask a coach how much of their week goes to admin and you’ll get a number that’s too low. Nobody’s being dishonest — the work is fragmented enough that it doesn’t leave a memory.

The published figures put it at up to thirty percent of the working week, with roughly an hour and a quarter a day going to scheduling and invoicing alone. When I’ve watched people work, that sounds about right, and the surprise on their faces suggests they’d have guessed half of it.

You don’t need to run a time study to find your own number. There’s a faster way.

The audit that takes twenty minutes

Don’t track forward. Look backward, at things that already recorded themselves.

Open your sent folder for the last two weeks. Read every email you sent. Sort them into two piles: coaching, and everything else. The everything-else pile is scheduling, confirming, chasing, invoicing, answering the same question again. Count them. Multiply by the three or four minutes each one really took including the context switch.

Look at your calendar for the same period. Count the appointments that moved. Each reschedule is a small negotiation with several messages in it.

Open every tool you pay for. Note what you did in each one this fortnight. Anything you entered in more than one place is duplicate work, and it’s the most reliably recoverable time in the whole business.

Write down what’s in your head. The follow-ups you owe, the person who said “check back in March,” the client whose package ends soon. Anything you’re remembering rather than reading is work your business is asking you to do continuously.

That last one usually lands hardest. Holding a list in your head isn’t free — it costs attention constantly, and it’s the reason the work feels heavier than the hours suggest.

What people find

Two patterns come up almost every time.

The duplicate entry. A name typed into a booking tool, then a CRM or spreadsheet, then an email platform. Three entries, one person, no reason other than that the tools have never met.

The remembering. Follow-up, re-engagement, renewals — all of it running on memory instead of a system, which means it runs inconsistently and generates a low background hum of guilt about the ones that got missed.

What to do with the number

Two things, and the order matters.

Fix the process before automating it. If your intake asks for things you never use, automating it means collecting the wrong information faster. Automation makes a process cheaper to run, not better. Anything worth automating is worth improving first — which is the part people skip, because improving is thinking and automating feels like progress.

Start with the duplicate entry. It’s the least interesting problem and the most reliably recoverable time. Nobody’s ever regretted no longer typing the same name into three systems.

You can’t automate before you optimise. Faster is not the same as better.