(CBS) Many of us live with a gnawing sense of dissatisfaction — a feeling that we're not making the most of our precious time on earth. Former BBC journalist Caroline Righton had that feeling, too. She decided to take do something about it, implementing changes to make her life richer and more rewarding.

Righton developed a take-charge process of viewing life as a balance sheet, accounting for each minute in the day and reclaiming time spent on the wrong priorities. She used her experience for the basis of her new book, "The Life Audit," which uses simple worksheets and charts in a step-by-step approach to making positive change.

"The Life Audit" is divided into three stages:

Filling out the life audit worksheets

Looking over the information to see what areas of your life can be nurtured and what activities need to be eliminated — or "audited out"

Figuring out how to use your newfound time to identify and pursue the dreams, goals, and relationships that make life most rewarding for you

Righton was once a morning show journalist for the BBC. That was before she had the idea to re-evaluate her life in an effort to make every second count. "I think that sometimes we can get so overwhelmed by life's emotional challenges and relationships and other people hijacking our hours that it's easy to just go, oh, and be sort of paralyzed," she told The Early Show co-anchor Hannah Storm. "I wanted to find a way of straightforwardly looking at my life in three stages, which was doing an audit, a stock take, finding a break, even to sort of prioritize what was important, and then having eliminated things that weren't important to then sort of really do something positive with the time I had left."

It begins with taking stock of your life, says Righton. "One thing we all have is time — our waking hours. You judge a man and a woman by what they do with those waking hours. So I divided life into 10 areas. You only have to do one area, or you can do the whole life. Just by standing outside yourself and seeing how you live each quarter of an hour, half an hour, who you spend it with, what you do," she said, "within 24 hours, you get a real feel for, 'That was good, that was bad, that was really boring.'"

Once you have that new perspective, Righton says, it's time to prioritize and eliminate. "In fact, that's quite tough sometimes if it's people that are hijacking your time," she said. "That's going to be a tough call. When you see the ones that you want to nurture or the people that you want to invest time in, then it becomes an easy win."

The next stage is time to take action. "It happens very quickly," said Righton. "I actually did my first life audit for months. In fact, most people report that within two or three days, big changes are happening. That's because they see clearly where they want to invest their time and energy, who they want to spend time with, which relationships need nurturing, which perhaps they don't need to spend too much time on."

For more information, go to www.thelifeaudit.com, and to read an excerpt from "The Life Audit," click here.

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