The Z-Scale Assessment Series

The Zealot Time Audit (ZTA)

List the tasks you actually logged this week. Tag each one — the audit builds the honest picture, and shows how far it sits from what you'd have guessed.

Log a real week in 30-minute blocks first. Then enter the tasks below and tag each by its type of work and what to do with it (DRIP). The audit stacks four lenses — the four types of work, the DRIP matrix, your Z-Scale capacity, and flow efficiency — to reveal your true productive time, the capacity hiding in plain sight, and the revenue waiting on the other side of it.

From Raising the Dead: Converting Your Workforce from Zombies to Zealots · by Jerry Peterson

1 · You and your rate

This puts real dollars on the time we're about to find.

Your annual income ($)

Your Z-Scale level (from the ZTI)

An hour of your best business-development work generates about this many times your cost rate in revenue — the honest knob on the revenue estimate. 1× is conservative; owners' value-creating hours are often worth 2–5×.

Enter income to see your effective rate and Buyback Rate.

2 · Your estimate — the gut check

Before you add up the tasks, guess how your week split across the four types of workiThe four types of work (Gene Kim). Every working hour is one of:
• Business projects — value customers pay for
• Internal projects — improving the business itself
• Operational changes — routine changes that keep things running
• Unplanned / firefighting — the work that ambushes the plan. We'll hold this up against the truth. Total 100%.

Business projects value-creating; customers pay for it Internal projects

Operational changes Unplanned / firefighting

Total: 0%

3 · Log your week — task by task

Enter each task you recorded, the hours it took, its type of work, and what should happen to it — DRIPiThe DRIP matrix — what to do with each task:
• Delegate — someone else can do it
• Replace — automate or eliminate it
• Invest — high-value; build it up and grow it
• Perform — only you can do it, and it matters; do it nowDelegate + Replace is the work to buy back. Invest + Perform is the work that matters.. The grids fill themselves from this.

Task

Hours

Type of work

DRIP

No tasks logged yet.

4 · Flow efficiency iFlow efficiency is the share of a task's total elapsed time that's actually spent being worked on — versus sitting in a queue waiting.Example: a task needs 2 days of real work but takes 3 weeks (≈15 working days) to clear the board. That's 2 ÷ 15 ≈ 13% flow efficiency — the other 87% was wait time between steps, not effort. Typical knowledge work runs 5–15%.

Of your working time, roughly how much is lost to waiting, queues, hand-offs, and delays?

Time lost to waiting / queues (%)

5 · Cognitive load iCognitive load is the mental effort the work itself demands — not a measure of you. Three parts:
• Intrinsic — how inherently complex the task is
• Germane — how much new learning it requires
• Extraneous — friction from how work is organized (context-switching, interruptions)Intrinsic and germane are a floor set by the work — they can't be reclaimed by fixing process, and they aren't anyone's fault.

Two kinds of load come from the nature of the work, not the worker. They quietly lower output per hour — and pure planning ignores them.

Intrinsic complexity how hard the work inherently is

Germane load new learning the work demands

Cognitive-load factor: 1.00×