There’s one finite resource that is crucially important in any business, and that’s time. Bad time management can lead to missed deadlines and plummeting quality control; it can also trigger a downwards spiral, with wasted hours leading to a longer working day and eventually mental exhaustion.
If we don't leave the office at a reasonable hour and make time to decompress, we get stressed, anxious and uninspired. And there's really no excuse for bad time management any more. With a whole range of time-tracking apps and gadgets, it's easy to trick yourself into productivity.
One of these devices is OfficeTime, an app that’s designed to track billable hours and quickly create invoices, but it also doubles as a time management device. I always imagined I was fairly productive during my working hours: I may check social media now and again, I thought, but when I put my head down, I can focus. OfficeTime provided a wake-up call.
To begin with, the tedious part is sitting down and figuring out how the app, which is compatible with Macs, PCs, iPhones and iPads, actually works. You create “projects” that you are working on, and divide each one into “categories”: for me, these might include researching, writing and editing.
Whenever you start a piece of work, you start a stopwatch that times how long you’ve dedicated to it. Switching tasks means stopping the clock on one session and beginning a new one. At the end of the day, week or month, you can then compile a report on how you’ve spent your time, and there are many ways to filter and modify the information.
Once the process is up and running, it indicates where time is being wasted and which projects are taking longer than intended. For me, the mere action of clicking on a timer is enough to make me focus on the task at hand. Switching the clock off to check Facebook or Twitter highlights any time-wasting behaviour. I can’t say that it’s broken all my bad habits yet, but it’s a start.
q&a track your day by the minute
Jessica Holland explains the benefits of tracking your time at work.
It takes so much time to programme these apps, isn’t it easier to keep one eye on the clock and scribble down your to-do list by hand?
Once you have dedicated an hour or two to setting up OfficeTime, it is definitely a time saver, especially if you bill by the hour and need to create complicated invoices. As for monitoring your own time usage, do not ever underestimate the power of denial. It may seem as though you only spent five minutes on Facebook, but it might have been closer to an hour throughout the day.
By eliminating breathing space – “dead time” for daydreaming – don’t these apps make us more stressed?
In fact, they should allow us to make more time for emptying our mind and daydreaming. By cutting down on time-wasting activities such as checking social media, apps such as OfficeTime allow us to take real breaks, where we can get away from the desk, go for a walk and come back refreshed.
What if I get interrupted and forget to switch sessions or switch off the clock?
You can easily add or subtract minutes from sessions and the app automatically deducts any time you are away from your computer.
How much do I have to fork out for all this?
After a free 21-day trial, it is US$47 for either the Mac or Windows versions of OfficeTime. There is also both a free and premium version for Apple mobile devices.
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