MSP owners: Where does your time ACTUALLY go? (including an exercise that gave me back 10 hours a week)

Quick question. Without looking at your calendar, how many hours have you spent so far this week working ON your MSP rather than IN it?

Got a number in your head?

What if I told you the odds are that that number is wrong???

Not because you’re lying to yourself deliberately, but because NOBODY accurately remembers where their time went without actually tracking it. We tend to round up the good stuff and round down the rest.

I routinely work around 30 hours a week. And every now and then I find that number is creeping up. Normally because a whole bunch of new jobs that I don't want to personally do have somehow landed on my shoulders.

This is the exercise I use to rebalance that. You can swipe it.

Accurately track your time without feeling like you have to log every time you nip to the toilet

Most time tracking apps really, really suck. They are bloated horrible messes. It often feels like they're creating work for you!

A few years back I discovered an app called Timeular (since rebranded to EARLY, though a lot of people still know it by the old name).

The app was okay. But what really attracted me to it was its physical tracker. It’s a small physical dice that sits on your desk. Every time you switch what you’re doing, you just turn it to a different face, and it logs the time against that category automatically.

SO simple and SO clever.

That physical tracker is the reason you would choose EARLY. If you don't think you'd use it, then just Claude code your own tracker following my rules below (I've recently abandoned my tracker and just use my own app (yes, it's my contribution to the SaaSpocalypse)).

Track 3 categories of work: Red, orange, green

The important thing is you don’t need to track every individual job. That is very very tedious and you’ll give up within a day. Instead, track just three categories of work.

Green tasks: Things you should be doing as often as possible. Working on your marketing, growing the business, developing your team. The genuinely valuable stuff that only you can do, or that moves the business forward.

Orange tasks: Things that are okay to do, but that you don’t want to be doing too much of. Client reviews, account management, speccing out projects. Stuff that's useful but it's not the highest value use of your personal time.

Red tasks: The evil ones. Basically anything you SHOULDN'T personally be doing at all. So... Tickets! Tickets! Tickets! Or loading social posts. Or installing cabling. Any day-to-day IN the business work that somebody else should be handling.

Run this for 2-3 full working weeks. Just turn the dice, or note it down, every time you switch what you’re doing.

IMPORTANT: Don’t try to change your behaviour while you’re tracking it. You want to observe and spot the patterns that happen every week, not just the one-off incidents that steal time from you.

What I found when I did this

I run this exercise on myself periodically. Whenever I notice I’ve been working more than 30 hours a week for a stretch, that’s my trigger to get my app out again, and find out what’s happening. In fact I think I'll run it next week.

Every single time, I find naughty red tasks that have crept back onto my desk. Things I’d previously delegated or eliminated that have somehow found their way back to me (usually because I said yes to “just this once” a few too many times).

Using this exact method for the first time a few years back, I eliminated around 10 hours a week of work that shouldn’t have been mine in the first place. TEN HOURS. Every single week. That's 500 hours a year!!!

And by running the process two to three times a year, I keep that 10 hours protected. Boom.

What to do once you’ve found your red and orange tasks

Once you see the patterns and you know what tasks you need to get off your desk, apply the principle of DOA.

No, not Dead On Arrival. That's what you will be if you keep trying to do everything yourself 😃

Instead... Delegate, Outsource, or Automate.

• Can someone on your team take this on?
• Could you hand it to someone outside the business entirely?
• Or is this something a tool, or AI, could now do for you without you lifting a finger?

Every red and orange task you clear this way is time that goes back into green tasks. Y'know, the stuff that actually grows your MSP rather than just keeping it running.

Your turn

Go back to that number you had in your head at the start of this newsletter. Now be honest with yourself. Are you confident it’s accurate? Or do you suspect, if you actually tracked it for a week, the real number would be lower than you’d like?

Let me know how much time you think you spend on red tasks each week. I read and reply to every email (it's an orange task for me).