Time Tracking Software That's Automatic

This Thursday, we’ll be hosting a webinar in partnership with the ABA entitled Managing Interruption and Information Overload.

Click here to register:
https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/7208283130676900864

The problem, as you are probably aware, with traditional time management techniques is that they don’t account for the fact you are busy supporting multiple clients amidst a non-stop barrage of interruptions. In this webinar you’ll learn practical tips and techniques for managing information overload – while still being responsive to your clients.

Specifically we’ll discuss:

• Ways to automate your marketing and business development (based on techniques and tools we use at Chrometa)
• 5 strategies for getting email under control
• How to accurately capture and bill for the interruptions you do deal with

https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/7208283130676900864

Chrometa 4.0 – and New Invoicing – Are LIVE

Just in case you didn’t see the big recent announcements…

Chrometa 4.0 is officially LIVE! Featuring email and mobile phone time capture:
http://www.chrometa.com/blog/chrometa-4-0-now-available-featuring-email-and-mobile-time-capture/

And we have a shiny new invoicing feature that allows you to create slick looking invoices and get paid electronically:
http://www.chrometa.com/blog/legal-invoicing-billingsoftware-get-paid-faster-with-chrometa/

Getting through your to-do list faster isn’t what time management is actually about – at least not anymore. After all, this is the digital era, baby!

You have a handheld supercomputer sitting in your pocket, a nonstop barrage of interruptions, and more expected of you than would have been expected of three accounting professionals a mere twenty years ago.

Rather than managing our existing allocation of time as if it was finite, we need to find ways to make our share of time larger, preferably by a multiple of two or more. Forget the modest notion of merely getting things done. We need to do better, and we can if we employ some “radical” strategies.

Strategy 1: Focus Intensely on the Single-Most Important Item

What you really need to do is to look at everything on your list, pick the single-most important thing, and then work on it, uninterrupted, until it’s completed.

The uninterrupted part is the toughest, by far. While it’s easy and tempting to check your e-mail, answer the phone, respond to an instant message, or click over to a Web site, if you can eliminate the interruptions, you’ll boost your productivity significantly and be able to work the same or even fewer hours.

No, you’re not squeezing thirty hours into a twenty-four-hour day. Instead, you’re making sure two things happen:

First, you’re working on the single-most important task at hand – not the most urgent task or the easiest one – the most important one. Don’t mistake this for putting out the biggest fire – emergencies are one thing, getting your most important task done is another. Most of the time – if we even have the time – we plow through our to-do lists without questioning whether it makes a difference if we complete most of tasks or not. The sad truth is this: It doesn’t matter. The 80/20 rule tells us that 80 percent of our results will come from 20 percent of our input. By picking the single-most important task to work on, we’re making sure that this action falls within the critical 20 percent.

Second, by focusing 100 percent of our energies on the single-most important item, we’ll accomplish it much faster than we would’ve if we’d allowed ourselves to be distracted by interruptions, or worse, tried to multitask and complete two or three items at once.

Interruptions are the real killer. It’s amazing how fast you can get something done, if that’s the only thing you do.

Strategy 2: Automate Everything – and I Mean Everything

Everything that’s being done manually in your office or when you work remotely needs to be given a good hard look. We’re on the eve of 2012. At long last, software is actually starting to work!

The dirty secret few software industry providers want you to know is that adoption rates – and I’m talking about adoption rates on anything – are actually pretty dismal. I believe that’s the case because most business software has traditionally been quite complex, requiring a lot of adoption, training, and wrangling on the part of the user. The result? We ultimately opt for a simple solution like Word, Excel, and perhaps QuickBooks to manage a practice.

If you’ve written off software for years – and trust me, you’re not alone – now is actually a good time to take a look around. Here are a few key business processes you can easily automate to help expand your available productive time:

Accounting: QuickBooks Online is good alternative to QuickBooks desktop. With QuickBooks Online, you can log in to your clients’ accounts directly without the need to send files back and forth. If you’re up for considering alternatives to the QuickBooks universe altogether, you might want to start your search with upstart Xero, an online accounting software program.

Time and billing: Our friend Dustin Wheeler, CPA, of Wallace Neumann & Verville, LLP, just wrote about a sweet time and billing hookup between my beloved time tracking app Chrometa and our invoicing partner FreshBooks. Check out Wheeler’s simple process for time tracking and invoicing here.

Project management: We use two products for project management. First, WorkFlowy is a great, free app for keeping a bullet point list you can share with your colleagues. It’s essentially a whiteboard on a Web page, which is often all you need for good project management. For more collaborative bells and whistles, such as milestone tracking and file sharing, check out Basecamp, the most popular project management app for small business.

E-mail marketing: I’m a huge fan of sending out a monthly e-mail newsletter. I believe it’s the highest leverage marketing activity you can do. More leverage gives us more time. If you’re new to e-mail marketing, the easiest tools to get started with, in my experience, are MailChimp and Constant Contact. Both make it easy to import your existing contacts and get started. I highly recommend you put this on the top of your marketing to-do list.

Strategy 3: Ditch (Most) of Your Social Media Efforts

If you think this idea is controversial, you probably need to be reading this. Are you actually getting anything from your social media efforts, or do you just feel busy?

Don’t confuse effort with effectiveness. If you’re not tracing new clients back to Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, maybe it’s time to dial back or outright ax the time you put into social media.

I speak from experience. At Chrometa, we don’t use social media as a lead-generation tool because we found it doesn’t work! I think social media is a great way to interact with clients and colleagues and to engage in conversation. It’s fine as a virtual watercooler, but it’s a big-time sink in terms of business development.

The Bottom Line

Remember when outsourcing was all the rage? Well, computers have come a long way, overtaking humans in a wide range of tasks. This is a very good thing for the enterprising professional. You can command a workforce much larger than your current one for the low monthly price of most software offerings.

Whether you consider outsourcing as part of your plans for 2012, the bottom line is simple. Eliminating your interruptions, automating your busywork, and reducing your social media burn should help you grow your total productive time – and make your work more fun and fulfilling to boot.

Take baby steps. If you only have the bandwidth to adopt one of the three time-saving strategies in this article, then go for one and tackle the others in succession. Make yourself a list of goals and stick to it!

Want to automate your timekeeping?  Click here for a free 14-day trial of Chrometa’s automatic time tracking software.

“Never confuse activity with achievement.” – John Wooden

Has it every been more challenging to get work done than it is today?  It’s quite ironic that, as fortunate as we are to have all of the technological innovations we enjoy today, these “productivity boosters” can be too much of a good thing.

Sometime late last year, I found myself really looking forward to a free weekend where I had nothing planned – which would allow me to get “a lot of work done”.  So starting Saturday morning, I plowed away at my “to do” list.  Same thing on Sunday.  I knocked off more things than I would have during a normal work week, and in only two days.

These weekend work sessions have become a real boon to my productivity.  And many people I’ve discussed this with have shared my experience.

“Absolutely, I can’t get anything done during the week, there are just too many interruptions,” they’ll say.

But recently I got to thinking – wait, there’s something really wrong with this picture.

First off – I love what I do.  I’m building my own company, I’ve gotten to choose everyone I work with – so absolutely no complaints.  BUT – is it healthy to work for consecutive weeks on end, without breaking away.

I don’t think so.  Hard work is great, and absolutely required for entrepreneurs.  But often our best ideas will come when we least expect it – when our mind is free to relax and drift.  This can’t happen if we work 24/7/365 – we just never get the opportunity.

So recently, I’ve started devising a system that would help optimize my personal/business productivity, AND bring a little more balance to my life.

I started by immersing myself in many of the time management and productivity methodologies out there – and there are no shortage of them.

I actually have traditionally avoided these, because, well, I fancied myself as being relatively productive.

So here’s an overview of a hybrid system I’ve developed.  One thing I learned is that, as an entrepreneur, my playbook is always changing.  So I need to develop a very flexible system – beyond just optimal efficiency.  Sure, it’s great if I get a lot done, but if it’s not the right stuff, who really cares anyway.

The three principles I’ve been successfully incorporating:

1. Always be prioritizing – most things don’t actually matter.

Classic 80/20 rule – 20% of the things you do will provide 80% of the value.  If you have 10 things on your “to do” list, the top 2 are much more valuable than the next 8 combined.

I’d encourage you to chew on this concept a bit – it’s simple, yet very powerful.  I try to reprioritize my top items on a weekly basis (this is a better use of weekend work time).  I’ve found that many of the “next 8” are no longer important anymore.

2. Don’t get too busy – fake it if you feel guilty.

Resist the urge to fill up your day with meetings, phone calls, and items that you need to get done.  I constantly ask myself: “What’s the worst that will happen if I don’t have this meeting?  If I don’t get this done?”  If it’s not that bad, axe it.

Sure, it feels great to be busy, and to “get a lot done.”  But I think as an entrepreneur, this is a trap.

If I look back at all the time I’ve invested in Chrometa since we founded it, most of the things I’ve done haven’t mattered at all in the long run. I’ll bet just 5% of my efforts have yielded 80% or more of our benefits.

Since I realized this, I’ve tried to sit back and think that if I only had one hour to work today, what would I do?  That usually helps push a sales/marketing activity to the forefront.  It’s never administrative work, that’s for sure.

And if you want to project a busy façade for the rest of the world to see?  Go for it – nobody’s going to know you’re not really that busy.  Heck, Ben Franklin used to run through the streets of Philadelphia carry reams of paper by hand back to his printing shop.  It was all for show – because not only did Franklin value hard work, but he also valued the appearance of hard work.

3. If it has to be done, then just focus and do it.

The old weekend phenomena revisited.  On weekends, with no incoming distractions, I can just focus in and knock something off.  Weekdays it’s been a challenge – emails, instant messages, phone calls, clicking over to the web (what’s the DOW doing today?).

So here’s how I am trying to emulate the weekend experience, during the week:

1. Practice time boxing for the items that I need to do – specifically, what is it, and how long will it take.  The list is a manageable size for the day, thanks to the vetting system we’ve discussed.  Never more than 5-6 “to do” items for a given day, and preferably even less.
2. Just do them – minimize interruptions until it’s done.  If it’s a long task, break it up into sub-items.  I’ve been quite amazed that even the most daunting task can often be knocked off in 60 minutes or less – provided the focus is there.
3. See how long it took.  This is something I use our time management software for, and it’s quite helpful.  I can see what time I started something, what time I finished, and how long it took.  Interruptions are also there.  Since I know I’m “on the clock”, and will be graded afterwards, I’ve been on my best behavior.

In sum, I’ve found that the key to my personal productivity is exactly what small business and time management guru Brian Tracy has been preaching for years – focus on just one thing at a time, your most valuable activity, and don’t stop until it’s completed.

Further Reading: The First Rule of Productivity: One Thing at a Time

One of the most powerful natural laws on the side of any successful entrepreneur and/or business person is the 80/20 rule.

Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto initially observed this in 1906, when he discovered that 80% of Italian real estate was owned by just 20% of the population.  Then he went out to his garden and saw that 20% of the pea pods contained 80% of the peas…so this was clearly a larger phenomenon!

In the business world, this means that 20% of your actions will account for 80% of your results.  Which means that, on the flip side, 80% of your actions will only account for only 20% of your results.  These are the activities that fill up your schedule, but add little or no value.

So if you find yourself wishing you had more time in the day to get everything done, this is a critical principle to keep in mind.  Because while you can’t add more hours to the day, you can make sure that you’re spending time on the most valuable activities.

Imagine the possibilities.  Right now, you’re probably spending only the equivalent of one day a week on your most important items.  If you doubled this to two days a week, and took the rest of the week off, you’d actually increase your productivity by 60%!

Legendary self-help author and guru Brian Tracy often encourages you to constantly ask yourself if you’re working on the single important thing that you could be doing.  Get in the habit of doing this more often, and you’ll find your productivity increasing by leaps and bounds – without actually working any longer – all thanks to the magic of the 80/20 principle!