Time Audit Template: Find What to Automate First
List the work your team repeats, and the template ranks it by hours saved per month. Then copy one prompt that runs the same audit on your real tracked time in Claude or ChatGPT with the Rize MCP. Free.
Example: a 12-person agency
Illustrative numbers, not benchmarks. The top two tasks free about 49 of the 60 hours a month this team could save.
| Rank | Task | How often | Hours/month | Share automatable | Hours saved/month | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Weekly client status reports | Weekly, 8 × 60 min | 35 | 75% | 26 | Automate now |
| 2 | Timesheet prep and chasing | Weekly, 12 × 30 min | 26 | 90% | 23 | Automate now |
| 3 | Monthly invoice prep | Monthly, 1 × 600 min | 10 | 60% | 6 | Assist, do not replace |
| 4 | Meeting notes and follow-ups | Weekly, 8 × 35 min | 20 | 25% | 5.1 | Assist, do not replace |
How to run a time audit for automation
Rank automation candidates by hours saved per month, which is monthly hours on the task times the share automation can remove. The template above follows these five steps.
- 1
List the repeating work
Status reports, timesheet prep, invoice prep, meeting notes, data entry. Anything that happens on a schedule.
- 2
Estimate hours per month
How often it happens, how many times, and how long each one takes. Rough numbers are fine for a first pass.
- 3
Score repeatability and judgment
High repeatability and low judgment means automate now. Repeating work that needs a person to edit gets AI assistance. Low repeatability or high judgment stays with people.
- 4
Rank by hours saved
Hours per month times the share automation can remove. The top two rows are usually most of the total.
- 5
Check it against tracked time
Run the prompt with the Rize MCP so the audit uses real hours, then rerun it monthly to see what the automation saved.
From the Rize workshop
This template is the takeaway from our workshop on finding automation opportunities with a time audit. Macgill Davis runs the audit live on a real workspace.
Frequently Asked Questions
A worksheet that lists the work your team repeats, how often it happens, and how long it takes. This template adds repeatability, judgment needed, and the share automation could remove, then ranks every task by hours saved per month.
Find the tasks that repeat on a schedule, follow the same steps, and need little judgment. Multiply the hours each one takes per month by the share automation could remove, and start with the biggest number.
Two to four weeks. One week misses monthly work like invoicing. Four weeks catches most recurring tasks without waiting too long to act.
Yes, if they can read your time data. Connect the Rize MCP and paste the prompt from this page. Claude or ChatGPT pulls your tracked time by task and project, confirms which tasks repeat, and returns the ranked list. Without Rize, attach a CSV export instead.
No. The template and the CSV download work on their own. Rize makes the numbers real: it captures time automatically by client, project, and task, so the audit runs on what happened instead of estimates.
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