Audit your week honestly, and you will probably find that a fair amount of it was never really yours to begin with. Most of us reach Friday with no real sense of where the time went. You were busy from the moment you sat down, answering everything, moving the meetings around, chasing the approvals, holding three other people’s days together on top of your own. And yet if your Executive asked what you had actually achieved that week, you might struggle to point to much beyond “I kept everything going.”
That is one of the odd things about this job. We spend our days managing everyone else’s time while feeling we have almost no control over our own. Everything happens so fast, and we are often so heads-down, getting on with other people’s priorities, that the thinking and the planning we need for our work get pushed to a gap that never quite arrives. It is not a sign that you are bad at the job. It is what happens when your role is, by design, reactive, and when nobody ever taught you to step back and look at the week as a whole. There is no training course for it, and on a normal week, there is very rarely time.
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It helps to be clear about what it means to audit your week, because it is easy to picture something far more elaborate than necessary. This is not a colour-coded spreadsheet updated every six minutes, and it is not the kind of productivity ritual that ends up being more work than it was meant to fix. To audit your week is simply to set aside a small, regular slot to look back at the week that has gone and look ahead to the one coming, and to ask honestly where your time actually went against where it should have gone.
The looking-back part of the exercise is easy to miss. We finish a week and move straight into the next one without ever asking why it felt the way it did. When you audit your week, you give yourself the chance to notice the patterns and behaviours you would otherwise run straight past, and you can do this for your Executive as well. It could be that you notice meetings that have overrun again or work you were asked to complete that you spent too much time on because you didn’t have clear direction, or the most obvious one for EAs, the half day that was meant to be spent on a project but instead was used up on interruptions and dealing with other people’s problems. None of these stand out on the day, because on the day you are just getting through it. They only become noticeable when you stop and look at the whole week at once.
The looking-ahead part of the exercise is where what you noticed gets put to use. So take the one or two things that mattered most last week, along with the interruptions that kept pulling you off them, and let both help you structure the days ahead. Block real time in the diary for your Executive’s priorities now, before the meeting requests and the inbox arrive to claim it, and decide in advance how you will handle the interruptions you already know are coming. The week then gets built around the work that matters, rather than around whoever happens to ask for your time first.
Stepping back to audit your week has always been worth doing, but the pressures that make it necessary have only grown, as we get more and more stretched in this role.
The modern EA is reachable in more places than ever. Email, the team chat, the messaging app, a message on your personal phone, a tap on the shoulder between meetings; each one arrives with an expectation that you will reply – usually straight away. On top of that, you have hybrid working, a longer list of stakeholders to keep happy, and diaries packed with back-to-back calls, and you end up with a week shaped almost entirely by other people. The demands are louder and more constant than they were even a few years ago, and almost none of them tell you which ones actually deserve your time, because, in their minds, they are the most important person you have to deal with. Without a moment to step back and assess what you should be doing, the loudest request (or the most annoyingly persistent person) usually wins by default, which is rarely the most important one.
This is why it pays to audit your week regularly.
When you audit your week, you are checking that your hours are used to add value, rather than leaking away, unnoticed, into work that feels productive but doesn’t really move anything forward.
So, how do you actually do it? The honest answer is that there is no single correct method, and the best version is the one you will keep doing. A few things make it far more likely to stick.
Pick a day and a time, and protect it like you would protect your Executive’s. Consistency is what turns this from a nice idea into a habit. Plenty of EAs find Friday afternoon works well, when the week’s energy is fading anyway, and you would otherwise be running down the clock ( this is when I do my weekly audits). Others prefer an undisturbed half hour on Monday before the emails come flooding in.
There are 168 hours in a week, so giving one of them to make the other 167 work harder is about the best trade you will make all week.
Then, put it in your own diary as a recurring hold, and treat it as a real meeting rather than the first thing you drop when someone needs something. When you sit down, work through roughly the same few questions each time so you are not starting from a blank page:
Keep your answers short, a sentence or two at most. The longer and more involved you make this, the sooner you will start finding reasons to skip it. Be efficient with it; move through the questions, capture what stands out, and get on with your day. The aim is a clear head and a plan for the week ahead, not a beautifully written report that nobody, including you, will ever read again.
It also helps to be the consultant rather than the culprit for half an hour. Imagine someone had hired you to look over a week in your working life and tell you, plainly, what was working and what was not. You would not waste their time beating yourself up about a rough week. You would look at what happened, name the cause, and suggest a better way to run the next one. That is the frame of mind that makes an audit useful rather than dispiriting.
The first time you audit your week, you will mostly just see the mess, and that is fine. The real value comes when you’ve been doing it for a few weeks, and you start to see the patterns repeat. You need that time to work out what is working for you and what isn’t, and then you can start fixing the root cause.
So, going back to our examples, when the same interruption shows up in three weekly reviews, it stops being just one annoying person or problem and becomes something you need to address. The standing meeting you are always preparing for at the last minute might not need to exist, or might not need you in it. The report you struggle to complete on time each month might need a retweak or some AI support. The afternoon that vanishes into thin air, week after week, might need better planning. You won’t notice any of this stuff over the course of a single day, but you will when you audit your week regularly enough to see the repeats, and seeing the repeat is what lets you remove the thing rather than keep doing it. Sorting one of these out properly saves you that same hour every week from then on, which is a far better return than getting slightly faster at doing it.
Each time you audit your week, you are building your case, too. When you can show, with examples, where your week actually goes, you are in a much stronger position to ask for what would change it, whether that is offloading a recurring task, redrawing a broken process, or protecting a block of focus time for your Executive. It is far easier to make that argument with a month of evidence behind you than with a vague sense that you are stretched. The work does not speak for itself, and an audit gives you the words.
The slightly unfair thing about all of this is that when you audit your week well, the result is an uneventful one. Nothing dramatic happens. The fire that never got started is impossible to point to, and an uneventful week is hard to put on a list of achievements, despite being exactly what good support really looks like. Saying that, the feeling of control you have over your time is worth its weight in gold (if it doesn’t quite equate to a pay rise).
That is all the more reason to treat it as real work, and to say so to the people you support. For an EA, managing your time well comes down to really deciding what deserves your attention and then protecting it, which matters far more than fitting more in. Do that, and the week stops being something that simply happens to you. When you audit your week with that in mind, you take back a little of the control the job so often strips away.
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