How a consulting firm is efficient with time and meetings

Warren is the owner of Warren Laine-Naida Digital Consulting, a consultancy that helps small businesses manage their online tools so that they have more one-to-one time with their customers.

The challenge: keeping track of time without spending more time

As a business owner, Warren has many different responsibilities which he needs to track and he needed to find a seamless and low effort way of managing this. He found he was spending a lot of time trying to keep track of his activities and he needed to find a solution that meant he wasn’t constantly looking at the clock.

“I also wanted to be fair to myself and clients that it was 45 minutes and not an hour.”

The solution: analysing meetings to optimise efficiency

Warren and his team use a combination of the Tracker and also make use of the mobile app when they’re on the go.

Warren tracks all aspects of his business by assigning each to an activity. These include the activities: meetings, individual projects, design, programming, measurement, travel and research. Meetings are what he pays a lot of attention to and tracks more in detail using the tags feature. For the purpose of the meetings Warren uses tags like #brand-A, #campaign-idea, #campaign-design and for the quality of the meeting he uses e.g. #good, #zoom, #too-many-peeps.

If he has the same sort of meeting (e.g. for an online campaign) for two different brands, he then compares them. Did one take longer than another? How many people attended? Is there something we should take into consideration when planning the next meeting?

The outcome: efficient time tracking and more visibility into where time goes

Before Warren and his team were tracking time, they were spending 30 minutes a day trying to keep a log of where their time was going. The team has now reduced this down to less than 10 minutes a day, which saves them at least an hour and a half per week.

Thanks to the insights that Timeular has provided, Warren and his team are able to optimise their meetings in order to be more productive: “meetings are probably one of the biggest consumers of our time – and if we are to increase velocity we need to look where we may be spending too much time for example, in our ideas and design sessions.”