Saturday 7th March 2026
The time audit: where a week in a principal's life really goes
For practice principals trying to deliver high-touch service, the gap between intention and reality raises the question of whether a time audit would help recalibrate their efforts.
Ask a practice principal how they spend their week, and clients will be at the centre of the answer. Meeting them, advising them, building relationships. It is what drew advisers to the profession, so it makes sense that they would be where they see their most valuable hours directed.
The data tells a different story of where the time is actually spent.
The uncomfortable arithmetic
Research from Kitces suggests that the typical adviser spends no more than about 50 per cent of their time on direct client tasks; and barely 20 per cent of their time actually meeting with clients. For principals who dreamt of a personal service, that figure can be the source of an uncomfortable reflection.
Where does the rest go? Many advisers spends as much time searching for clients as they do meeting with all their existing clients. Add compliance obligations, administrative tasks, professional development and the operational demands of running a business, and the hours disappear quickly.
These numbers should prompt serious questions about whether the current allocation of time reflects the adviser’s intentions. And if there’s a better way to approach their days.
Breaking-down the week
Breaking the allocation of time down even further, a principal’s week typically fragments across seven broad domains: client meetings, meeting preparation, financial-planning work, investment management, business development, administration and practice management. Understanding how time is actually distributed across these categories, rather than how it feels, requires deliberate measurement.
In the average week, 8.8 hours will go to meeting with clients, 5.3 hours in meeting preparation and 6.6 hours per week doing the supporting planning, investment and analytical work. That’s roughly 21 hours on what might be called core-advice delivery. The remaining 20-plus hours of a typical week scatter across activities that may be necessary but rarely feel like the reason anyone entered the profession.
The challenge for principals lies in the distinction between urgent and important. Administrative tasks demand immediate attention. Compliance carries consequences if it is neglected. The inbox fills relentlessly if it’s not managed. Meanwhile, the strategic work of improving systems, developing staff and deepening client relationships gets pushed to the margins and never quite materialises.
What the highest performers do differently
The good news is that there are things that can be done to improve the ratios of time spent, when it’s well-managed. When it comes to the most productive advisers, their client meeting time is about 10 percentage points higher than the least productive advisers. This amounts to roughly four hours per week, which at one hour per meeting adds up to nearly 200 additional client meetings throughout the year.
Achieving this will come from reducing the amount of time spent on ‘middle’- and ‘back-office’ tasks for those clients by leveraging staff support. The arithmetic is straightforward: every hour a principal spends on work that could be delegated is an hour unavailable for the activities only they can perform.
The delegation deficit
Delegation is a big part of the solution, though that’s easier said than done. Many principals understand intellectually that delegation improves productivity. Fewer act on that understanding consistently. The reasons vary: concern about quality, the time required to train others, the comfort of familiar tasks or simply the absence of anyone to delegate to.
For sole practitioners, this can also create genuine tension. Without support staff, delegation means either outsourcing or technology, both of which require upfront investment of time and money that may feel unavailable. The trap is that staying caught in low-value tasks perpetuates the resource constraints that prevent escape.
Conducting your own audit
The starting point for change is accurate measurement. That means not estimation, or relying on intuition. It means actually tracking how time is distributed across a representative period.
This needn’t be elaborate. A week of noting activities in 30-minute blocks reveals patterns that years of vague awareness never surfaces. Categories should align with how you think about your work: client meetings, preparation, administration, compliance, business development, management and personal development provide a reasonable framework.
The initial goal should be, simply, clarity: understanding where time actually goes creates the foundation for deciding where it should go. Without that baseline, improvement efforts target symptoms rather than causes.
From audit to action
Once you’ve got a regular breakdown of the way the week pans out, the real value of a time audit lies in what it enables: making informed decisions about restructuring, delegation, technology investment and process improvement.
Start with the highest-impact opportunities. If meeting preparation consumes excessive hours, systematise it with templates and checklists. Where administrative tasks fragment the day, batch them into defined blocks. If compliance documentation sprawls across the week, integrate it into advice-delivery workflows.
The advisers thriving in today’s environment have made deliberate choices about time allocation. They’ve confronted the gap between intention and reality, measured what matters and restructured their weeks around their highest-value activities.
Nicholas Way is a contributing editor at The Inside Adviser and has covered business, retirement, politics, human resources and personal investment over a 50-year career.
