The Problem of Time Management

I Need a Better Way to Organize the day …

Unscheduled calls, random emails, chat requests, drop-ins or distractions all conspire to drown productivity. Productivity needs focus time, and defending focus time requires controls around your environment, your phone, and some good tools. Here are some decent strategies you can apply to help you and your team defend your focus time.

Try Establishing These Daily Habits

• Daily Goal Setting
  • Clearly define individual goals each day, make sure they align with the team goals
• Implement Predictable Patterns
  • Break the day up into themes by grouping similar tasks together at the best time of the day for each individual
  • Communicate clear guidelines on availability with customers and teammates
  • Designate focus time to the part of the day which balances the lowest probability of distractions with the best output time of the individual
• Defend focus time
  • Apply Do-Not-Disturb defenses to focus time by turning off the phone, closing email/chat and close the door/put on some headphones
  • Empower individuals to constantly prioritize inbound tasks as they appear by evaluating “Is this task more important than the goals I/We have set for today or can this wait?”

Tools

Tools can’t replace execution and discipline, but they can help.

• Add a second “planner” calendar and overlay it with your primary calendar to help define boundaries for themes and organize blocks of time
• Implement an appointment application to help communicate availability with your clients and vendors.
• Use built-in Do-Not-Disturb function on phones and computers

MyTimePA connects with your productivity tools to help provide insight into daily events. By classifying the different events, tasks and activities it can help you build a strategy to organize and stay on track.

I need help understanding and classifying all the types of work we do…

Within any team there can be a daily struggle to ensure the right things are being worked on at the right times. A team member with good intent can still be derailed constantly by external distractions. As deadlines begin slipping, they may need some help to get a handle on what is constantly attacking their priorities and take action.

Viewing and classifying the inbound tasks and distractions can help a good leader to provide cover for inundated team members so that the team’s priorities are protected.

MyTimePA integrates with productivity, communications and issue tracking tools in near real time to quantify and classify inbound events. It then reports on utilization and trends. The reporting can help leaders identify patterns, problems or high demand sources and take action to divert or block some of the inbound and/or re-align priorities as needed.

I need help reporting on the work we do…

Whether or not your business has a formal time accounting process, it’s helpful to track time expended on different tasks. At times, you may need to show what your team has been working on and how much of their time is being consumed on important vs unimportant things.

Time records can help if you need to present a strong case to:

• Justify shortening scopes or extending deadlines
• Asking for a additional resources
• Canceling or deferring less important projects

Asking team members to maintain time records may not work with your organizational culture. It can be a significant change, and team members unused to time accounting or even those who are may resist the change. So how can you build a time reporting system without asking team members to track their own time?

MyTimePA tries to eliminate much of the manual aspects of time accounting by connecting with productivity tools and automatically ingesting work and effort. It process and make reasonable estimates of time spent on communications, meetings and activities which are then classified into their relevant projects. A team leader can reconstruct reasonable snapshots of their team’s time and how it is being consumed to then take relevant action.

Where is my time going?…

Find and stop time leaking away! Easier said than done. Most of us are terrible at estimating how long tasks take to complete. There is a always some minute little detail that takes three times longer to execute than planned. As a business owner you need to see where the extraneous time is going.

Good information leads to good decisions, should you bill for it, delegate it, automate it or deflect it?

MyTimePA integrates with business tools to automatically track where the extraneous time goes. It can associate similar work, identify related tasks and classify all the time to help find leaks or unaccounted time.

Revenue is everything, I need to Maximize Billable Time

Hidden or unplanned tasks have a habit of just showing up. When planned work doesn’t fit an easily repeatable model, unknowns creep in. They often consume more time than expected and rarely accounted for or billed. This is a problem for both fixed fee or hourly billed services, everyone hates unplanned costs.

Failing to account and bill for these unexpected costs cheapens your product, decreases your profit and constrains your cash flow. Failure to address it leads to underbidding on future work and the cycle repeats, stifling your growth. Failing to properly recognize and account for it allows it to slip through the cracks.

MyTimePA integrates with both project and productivity tools to automatically track where the extraneous time goes. It can associate similar work, identify related tasks and classify all the time. It can track the true time costs of your projects leading to more accurate bidding for future work help generate tighter scopes or simply helping you recover the costs.

I need to Minimize and Control Outside Distractions…

More than likely 20% of your tasks are sucking up 80% of your time. In most cases, that same 80% doesn’t represent 80% of your revenue. Ouch that hurts! Which customers, projects or tasks are the time sinks and need controls? You need to identify patterns and trends and get control again. Find which mistakes and oversights are consuming time. Who or what is the major consumer of all the time and why?

MyTimePA tries to remove a lot of the manual aspects of time accounting by connecting with project, communications and productivity tools to automatically track effort. Identify upward trends early and take action before costs get out of hand.