Where did your agency’s hours go last month? Not the billable hours in your project tool. All of them. Alan Lazaros can answer that for his whole 18-person team, because every one of them logs their time against three priorities and he runs the logs through ChatGPT once a month. He’s the CEO and co-founder of Next Level University, a coaching and podcast production company that works with 106 podcasters and business owners on recurring plans. He explained the system on the Unscripted SEO Podcast, and it’s the simplest team-management tool I’ve heard in a while. You can watch the full episode here or listen on Castos.
The four-column time log
You don’t need software for this. Alan’s team uses a spreadsheet with four columns:
- Date.
- Time in minutes. Not to the millisecond, just honest.
- What you accomplished. An outcome, not “worked on the audit.”
- Which priority it served. Every team member has a top three, and the row has to name one.
“And if you can’t tie it to one of those three priorities, you don’t track it.”
That rule does the real work. Anything that can’t be tied to a priority doesn’t make it into the log, so whatever doesn’t fit shows up as missing time, and missing time is a question you can ask in a one-on-one. Alan calls the three priorities a P3 target, a bullseye with P1 in the center.
A monthly AI review of where the hours went
Once a month, Alan feeds the logs to ChatGPT and asks where the team actually invested its time.
“Because where you and your team invest their time is the leverage point of your company’s success.”
What comes out is a stop-and-start list: stop doing this, start doing that, double down on what matters. For an SEO agency, that’s how you’d find out that reporting eats a day a week, or that one client is quietly getting twice the hours it pays for. Here’s how I’d set up the prompt for your own team:
- Paste a month of rows per person, with each person’s three priorities at the top.
- Ask for total minutes per priority, per person, and the share that went to P1.
- Ask which recurring tasks took the most time and which priority they served.
- Ask what one task each person should hand off or delete next month.
That’s an AI use case that doesn’t touch a client deliverable at all. If you’re figuring out which parts of the job to hand to a model, what SEOs are actually handing to the robots is a good place to compare notes.
Why I wish I’d had this running an SEO department
I told Alan about my first management job. I got promoted out of website hosting support to run a marketing department of ten people. The SEO program at the time was mostly emailing a hundred customers a monthly to-do list: do this with your website and you’ll have SEO success. Six months later the calls came in. Clients hadn’t done any of it, nobody was happy, and we had a huge churn rate.
So we started doing the work for them: writing content and building links in 2008 and 2009. Revenue grew by 3 million dollars. Then the company was sold, raises froze at 2% a year, and I couldn’t reward the people doing three times the work. Alan’s read was blunt.
“Yeah, that’s bad leadership right there.”
The people doing the work, he said, need to be incentivized and to feel supported by their leadership, “but also there needs to be a standard set.”
A time log tied to priorities is the standard. What you pay people for that time is the support. You need both.
Gold, silver and bronze glass balls
Alan gives every team member a metaphor to go with the log. You’re juggling 12 balls. Nine are rubber and bounce. Three are glass: gold, silver and bronze.
“You never drop the golden glass ball. And if you do drop a glass ball, make sure you drop a bronze and pick up a gold.”
He borrows Steve Jobs’ DRI idea, the directly responsible individual, to make it stick: “you can mess up as much as you want in everything except these three things.” For an agency, a team member’s gold ball might be client communication, the silver one rankings work, the bronze one internal documentation. Name them out loud and people stop treating everything as urgent.
What this does to your agency’s ceiling
Alan’s company averaged 119% annual growth from 2019 to 2023, then slowed to 18% in 2023 and 11% in 2024 after it grew to 24 departments. He cut to eight. The time log is how he keeps the team pointed at the eight that matter. Tom Malesic told a similar story about concentration risk in agency lessons from 30 years.
The full conversation, including Alan’s delete, delegate, double down plan, is in the Unscripted SEO recap. So pull up last month. Could you say what share of your team’s time went to each person’s top priority? And if not, what would you find if you could?