Track The Time Blog

If you’re the type of person that lives for 5 o’clock, then this clock is for you. You can get it at the MoMAstore. It was designed by Tibor Kalman, an influential designer of the 20th century.

Are you always behind schedule and constantly working towards the next deadline, afraid that you might miss it? It’s quite possible that you are suffering from the side effects of not having deadlines.

Hence the title of this post: You can’t hit a target if you don’t have a target to hit.

Real World Translation: Your projects will always be late if you don’t have targets written down that you can meet.

You wouldn’t believe how important deadlines can be towards the health of your company and your well being. Over the years, I have gone through stages where I had a deadline for every project, and other times where I didn’t. Life is much easier when every project has a start date and an end date, with milestones along the way.

When every project has a deadline, you know when you are ahead and when you are not. So make your next to-do item this: Schedule my projects and start with start and end dates for every project.

I discovered a great podcast from a site called DonationCoder.com. In a 2 part interview, personal productivity guru David Allen talks about “Getting Things Done,” and goes in depth about the key principles, the subtleties of the system, and some potential trouble spots.

Click here for the podcast with David Allen.

Shortly after I read Getting Things Done I had a great struggle over the concept of having a folder for everything. I hate using file folders because you can only fit so much into each of them, and once you have a lot of things inside of them, it begins to get cluttered. Plus, with file folders. You can’t throw them around because they would spill all over.

That’s when I discovered what I call “project folders” (large catalog envelopes that can fit 11 x 17 sheets of paper). I can put everything related to a project inside of one, and it all fits. I don’t even have to organize what is inside of each folder, because I know it’s there, so I can easily find it in under a minute.

I would not say I have embraced the “GTD” lifestyle. A few key things changed my life, and I think that’s how most people look at GTD. Read the book, find one or two things you can embrace, and at the end of the day, one or two things can make a big difference.

I was reading the Wikipedia’s article about time tracking today, and ran across some great content about the advantages of time tracking. Here they are:

Time tracking can lower costs in 3 ways: by making payroll processing more efficient, by making costs visible so you can lower them, and by automating billing & invoicing.

Time tracking can increase revenue through automating billing, which tends to make it easier for a company to get correct invoices out for all hours worked by consulting staff. This speeds up payment and eliminates the hassles of ‘dropping’ bills.

By lowering costs in 3 ways, and increasing revenue in one way, timesheet management technologies that are web-based can improve the health of companies.

In the project management world timesheets can also be used to build a body of knowledge about how much effort tasks take to develop. For example if developing a training plan has historically taken a month, then it can be assumed that creating a new one will take a month.

I’ve discovered that most people only log their time in their timesheets if it is billable. I’m going to give you a new reason to track all of your time, even the unbillable moments in your day.

Statistics.

Imagine being able to pull up a graphical chart showing your billable time compared to your unbillable time. You could see at a glance that a large chunk of your day was either billable or unbillable. Companies call this an employees utilization, and the goal is to have a large proportion of your day be billable.

It’s great information to have, because you can keep appraised of your overall effectiveness.

Well, our tool will give you the ability to see how your time is utilized, but it won’t tell you this unless you log all of your time. Billable and unbillable.

Don’t worry, we’re going to make it super easy to do all of that, so it won’t be a pain.

If you’ve ever had clients and worked in the services industry, you will know as I do that there are sometimes situations where you should have said no to a request, but didn’t.

Then, a few days later, you regret it and find yourself missing deadlines.

I discovered some great tips online that I wanted to share. They’ll help you learn to say no, when you should. Click here to read them.

Three of my favorites:

• Excel at just a few things, rather than being just average at many. Don’t try to do everything.
• You have a right to say no. Remember that others may take you for granted and even lose respect for you if you don’t.
• Provide suggestions or alternatives to the person who is asking. (”I can’t do that task today, but how about next week,” or “How about asking John instead?”)