“Timeular has really helped us identify areas of inefficiency and implement new processes. We have saved 25% of our time thanks to Timeular.”

Erin Enderle, Attorney at Levy & Associates

The challenge: finding a way to improve efficiency and stay profitable

When the two firms that now form Levy & Associates merged, Erin needed a way to understand how each team was using their time and what improvements they could make to ensure they were working in a similar fashion and unify the process. One firm was very technological and operated remotely, and the other firm was much more traditional with 80 people working in an office and so Erin needed a way to easily understand how she could ensure efficiency across both.

The solution: leveraging the data to identify where efficiency can be improved

At first, the attorneys were against using Timeular as they felt that introducing a time tracking tool was leading towards micromanagement. To move past this, Erin started using Timeular herself and presented her data to the team so that they would realize that time tracking was not a form of micromanagement but more a way of identifying trends and being able to understand where time is going.

Rather than looking at how long each individual activity lasted, what time she had started and finished work, or how many hours she had worked in total, Erin demonstrated how Timeular made it easy to quickly see how many hours she had spent on profitable activities rather than tasks such as emailing.

Quickly the attorneys began to see that Timeular was a helpful tool as they were able to look at their data and see where they had spent too much time on certain activities and which activities they needed to focus more time on.  Attorneys are expected to spend half of their time on profitable activities and then the other half on the activities that are not linked to profitability including answering emails and attending court hearings.

Erin meets with the attorneys every week and together they look through the insights provided by Timeular. They have seven activities that their work falls into: standard attorney drafting, production (assigning lawsuits and judgements, these are the things that drive the business), communications, hearing and trial attendance, hearing and trial preparation, meetings, other and non-attorney support work. The expectation is that 40% of an attorney’s time should be spent on production.

The result: 25% more time and improved processes

Erin explained that the attorneys have been surprised when looking through the data that Timeular generates. One attorney didn’t realize how much time they were spending on emails and have now made some changes to improve the balance.

When the team started using Timeular, Erin was able to identify that attorneys were spending a vast amount of time on preparation for hearings. As Levy & Associates is a national law firm, they have a lot of hearings covered by numerous attorneys in varying states. Often an attorney will work on the preparation for the hearing, but another attorney will attend and do the preparation for the hearing too. The hearing is being prepared for twice and both attorneys are paid.

The owner of Levy & Associates also uses Timeular to see an overview of how the team is spending their time, and so it’s helpful for the team to have everything in the same place that’s accessible to those who need it.

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As part of this project, they have set up a small, community-driven chain of organic grocery stores that aims to build a system to show what the economy could look like if these problems were solved. There is no private ownership involved and all profits are donated towards fighting extreme poverty and climate change.

The store is run on a membership model: members can participate by spending three hours a month volunteering in the store to support the movement and receive a discount on their shopping.

“Now that we are growing, Timeular is crucial to our organization for being able to operate professionally.”

Mattis Steib, Co-founder of Robin Hood Store

The challenge: finding a way to maximise efficiency

The Robin Hood Store team consists of multiple volunteers and also 11 employees who work at least 15 hours a week. As the team began to grow the system that they are aiming to build, they realized that they needed an easy way to track their time to help them understand where it’s going and how they can maximize efficiency. They also needed a way to manage the HR organizational parts of a growing business, including recording paid leave, sick leave and staying on top of over and under hours.

The solution: harnessing the power of Timeular’s data

All employees who work at least 15 hours a week now use Timeular. They were drawn to Timeular’s Tracker and the QuickTrack shortcut to quickly create time entries for their activities and to create a record of their working hours and time off.

The team operates with a holacratic structure and is divided into different teams, which is represented by the folders within Timeular. Each team uses two activities: one for ‘recurring tasks’ and the other for capturing ‘improvement tasks.’ They also use hashtags to define the specific tasks they are working on.

Mattis uses the data to understand how they are spending their time across the recurring tasks and uses this to inform his decision about whether to invest time automating certain tasks going forward.

One recent decision Mattis made was informed by Timeular data: “as weekends are busier in the store, we have a separate stock ordering process to support this. Thanks to the data in Timeular, I was able to easily understand how much time this recurring activity was absorbing and made the decision to invest an hour into automating part of the process. This has saved us at least 30 minutes every week, which really adds up over time.”

Mattis exports the data from Timeular into a G-sheet that is set up to calculate the data according to the hours each team member is set to work and ensures that they do not owe any time. This sheet also helps them identify whether the team has used their holiday allowance or if any time off in lieu is owed. This also easily enables employees to adjust their hours over several days depending on if they have over or under hours.

Another part of Robin Hood Store’s mission is to grow the system that they are trying to build. There is no private profit involved but they instead reinvest the bigger part of the profit in order to grow. It’s important for them to be able to know how much they’re investing in terms of time and what they are doing with the time spent on a daily basis.

The outcome: supporting growth with Timeular

Thanks to Timeular, Mattis and the team are now able to accurately calculate over and under hours, which is important to them when operating as a professional organization.

Before introducing Timeular, Mattis describes the way that they were trying to keep on top of hours worked and leave taken as chaotic: “everything before was vague and operated on a trust base. We needed a proper solution to support us as we grew.”

Going forward, Mattis and the team will be using Timeular’s leave tracker which can replace everything they have been doing in the G-sheet with their exported data.

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“The more a project is worked on, the more costly it becomes, so it’s important that the team knows how much time is being spent on a project in total, as the project progresses and not just at the end.”

Mieke Motmans, Ortho Clinical Engineering Team Leader at Materialise

The challenge: finding a way to identify how much time is spent on each project

Mieke’s team focuses on processing cases for their customers. The team works on different projects and so it’s important for them to be able to identify how much time they spend on each case and on which project.

Before they started using Timeular, the Materialise Team worked with a system that they checked on a monthly basis. They were required to log how much time they had spent on each task in hour long blocks. During busy periods, the team often forgot to log their hours and so they would fill out their hours at the end of the month using guess work, which led to a lot of inaccuracy and took up time.

The solution: using the insights to remain profitable

Mieke and the team use Timeular to log how much time they are spending on each case and project. Materialise makes cost calculations based on each product separately and so it’s important for them to have an accurate record of how the time is spent. Often they are involved in bigger projects from other teams and so it’s helpful for them to keep track of how much effort is being put into a project.

Using the data, Mieke can see how busy each team member has been and if there is time spare to work on projects. This is helpful as they try to keep the time spent on cases equal across the team so that they can all work on projects too. The process engineers also use the data to identify where they can increase efficiency.

The team tracks the issues they are working on by assigning them to a category. The data is exported to Excel and then the team adds their case information to make final reports. The team uses hashtags to differentiate between projects. This helps them understand how much time they’re spending on issues in total and provides the information they need when they make the case to management to ask for additional help.

It’s helpful for project managers to know who worked on each project and how much time was spent in total. Every month they look at the total amount of time spent on a specific product and check whether it was realistic and within budget. Timeular helps the team stay profitable.

The outcome: accurate data that ensures projects stay within budget

Thanks to Timeular, the data that the team generates is now entirely accurate, much broader and provides a much more specific breakdown which helps the team learn from how they’ve spent their time. Projects now stay within budget and the team ensures that work is evenly distributed and that any spare time is enjoyed fairly across the team on projects outside of the usual cases.

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“My time spent on revenue-generating projects has increased by ~10% each week and time in meetings decreased by about 1-2 meeting per week.”

Angela Morisette, SVP Business Operations at Scratch Financial

The challenge: switching between projects and losing track

Angela’s role juggles multiple projects at one time and so she often finds herself switching between tasks and losing track of what she had worked on and when.

Before she started using Timeular, Angela was trying to manually create Google calendar entries, which took up a lot of time and resulted in missing entries and inaccurate data. This left Angela in a position where it was hard to know how long tasks took and so making accurate future estimations was impossible.

The solution: easy and efficient time tracking

Despite her initial skepticism of the ease of building a time tracking habit, Angela was drawn to Timeular because of the Jira integration, which she knew would work well with her setup.

Giving herself the goal of tracking for at least one week, Angela was delighted to realise after a few days that the ease of use of Timeular meant that building a time tracking habit was much easier than she anticipated.

Tip: emulate Angela’s approach by setting up a budget in the Timeular app to track for a week.

Timeular provides Angela with the data she needs to build an awareness of where the hours in her working week go. She is able to quickly see how much time is spent on OKRs or on each client and, based on this information, she is able to make adjustments for the week ahead.

The outcome: focusing on revenue-generating work

Angela explains that Timeular’s data has supported her decision to say no to more meetings, which has allowed her to focus more on revenue-generating work.

As well as visibility of where her time goes, Angela finds the Tracker to be a great physical reminder to help her to focus and is now recommending Timeular to colleagues.

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The post How a SVP of Business Ops uses data to prioritize her time appeared first on Timeular.

“The precise time tracking allows us to be more transparent with expenses and makes costs easier to understand. This strengthens trust.”

Head office, Austrian Red Cross

The challenge: understanding how employees divide their time

A challenge also faced by many other organizations, the Austrian Red Cross Head Office needed to find an easy way to understand how employee time is spent across ongoing projects. The team was looking for an effortless solution that allowed them to easy get insight across the organization in order to optimize operations.

The solution: increasing efficiency

Timeular for Teams has transformed the organization’s approach to time management and increased transparency. Staff are more productive and can submit timesheets easily without the need for manual entry.

Austrian Red Cross teams use Timeular’s folders feature to track time together. The insights help Head Office make data-driven decisions when planning campaigns and managing resource.

The Timeular mobile app also helps the team improve performance evaluation and makes it easier to bill accurately.

The outcome: unlocking more time for important activities

Timeular has become an integral tool for the Austrian Red Cross. To-the-minute accurate timesheets are submitted automatically through the app. Time reports can be downloaded with one click, and time invoices are produced with ease.

By introducing time tracking staff now work smarter, not harder. Less time is wasted tackling administration tasks, unlocking more time for where it’s needed most- helping people in crisis, both in Austria and around the world.

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“Timeular is a great tool which makes it easy for the entire team to use data to make decisions.”

Ricola HQ, Switzerland

Challenge: capturing where time is spent to identify time-wasting activities

Like all forward-thinking organisations, the office team at Ricola were keen to capture where their time is spent in order to objectively identify perceived time-wasting activities and to have the data they need to make positive changes.

The team also needed to provide a simple management-friendly report to provide transparency over time spent on various innovation projects.

It was at this point that they learned of Timeular and embarked upon a 3-month data-collecting and learning period.

Solution: increased transparency into how time is spent

The Ricola team uses the Tracker to easily track how their time is spent and automatically populate timesheets in the Timeular app. With the insights, they can then analyze how they have spent their time and make data-informed decisions to optimize how they spend their time.

The team is able to easily and efficiently track where their time goes without losing focus on the task at hand.

Outcome: insights that help drive data-informed decisions

Using the full suite of Timeular products (Tracker, desktop and mobile apps) so as to ensure everyone can track, analyze and improve according to their platform preference, the team at Ricola have already started to see potential for where time can be optimized.

The data has helped them understand that they are spending a lot of time in meetings, and so they have reviewed the number of meetings and made changes accordingly.

Team members are also seeing the personal benefit of Timeular, with feedback that the Tracker is helping make individual task and project time more focused. The team are also finding that they switch between tasks less often and Timeular has converted even the initial skeptics.

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“It’s fun to track time via a haptic device. There’s an aspect of gamification involved that I find very useful to get things done.”

Michael Lanzinger, Attorney at Law and Owner of Kanzlei Michael Lanzinger

The challenge: juggling cases and keeping track of time

Michael’s role leading the firm requires him to juggle the management of multiple cases and clients across different locations. This presented challenges with understanding exactly where his time was being spent and he needed to find a solution that helped him easily see how much of his time was billable and how many hours a day were being spent on activities outside of this.

The solution: tracking all tasks to build a clear picture

Michael starts his day at 6:30am with a coffee in his office. From that moment on, he starts tracking his various activities, using the analytics dashboard in the Timeular app to see exactly where every minute of his working day is spent.

He tracks projects (e.g. LegalTech), cases and also private activities (mainly breaks) using his Tracker to increase his time efficiencies. When he is not in court, much of his time is taken up by client meetings, researching cases and completing project documents. Each week, he also tries to find the time to write a blog for his legal practice website. Using Timeular helps him see where his time sinks are and find the space to tackle reactive work too.

“Planning is not a good thing to do every day since as a criminal lawyer cases and clients are likely to ‘pop up’ unforeseen. I try to leave the office at around 6:00 pm but most days I stay longer due to my workload.”

Keeping track of his time also helps Michael to assign certain activities and their duration better to individual cases.

Outcome: increased transparency and better trust

The reporting functionality of Timeular means that Michael can provide more accurate billing for his clients, which increases transparency and develops trust.

Thanks to Timeular, Michael has a better grasp on how he spends his time and this allows him to be able to plan effectively and be more accurate with his time.

And for the German speakers, Michael also wrote about Timeular on his blog.

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He helps others fulfil their ultimate adventures in travel and sport.

“Discipline is most important. I remain focused using the pomodoro method and by listening to classical music.”

Tobi Deckert, Entrepreneur

The challenge: carving out time for focused work

Juggling the workload of all companies brings great responsibility and an ever growing to-do list. Tobi found himself struggling with multiple subtasks and lacking focus. He was keen to find out how much time he was spending across all of his projects and find ways to optimize his available time.

The solution: using Timeular to develop structure

Tobi starts his day at 6am with a session of tabata, followed by yoga and a short meditation. “Throughout the routine, my mind is completely focused.” Afterwards he starts writing his daily plan.

His day is structured into two big tasks, one he has to do and one he wants to do. “This keeps me motivated working in my ‘zone’.”

He tracks the activities he works on within his companies as #internal and the ones he does for #external partners too. This helps him seeing where every minute of his working day is spent and makes it easier when it comes to billing clients and planning new projects. He explains: “developing a structure for how you spend your time is the most important thing for the self-employed.”

Since using Timeular, Tobi now has four hours each day where he remains in the “zone” which wasn’t possible before. He finds that the Tracker keeps him in the rhythm of time tracking and finds the Pomodoro method useful when maintaining focus. “I forget to start or stop the timer less and pick the activities according to the people I work with.”

The outcome: increased focused work throughout the day

Over time, Tobi has noticed a marked improvement in his overall productivity levels and uses the insights provided by Timeular to optimize his workflows. He downloads and shares PDF reports of the time he has spent on different projects with his clients, which increases transparency and builds trust.

“It’s like a puzzle. First, you need to find the right pieces, then you need to try and see what happens and if they fit. It’s important to have the discipline or your own system to keep you accountable and to make it a habit/routine.”

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“It’s fun to track time via a haptic device. There’s an aspect of gamification involved that I find very useful to get things done.”

Michael Lanzinger, Attorney at Law and Owner of Kanzlei Michael Lanzinger

The challenge: juggling tasks without knowing how much time they are taking up

The architecture team at Farnsworth Group juggle multiple projects at a time and also need to keep on top of administrative tasks on the side. Leona and her team were struggling to know exactly how much time they were spending on each task and therefore didn’t know which ones to prioritize or how to optimize the time spent on each project.

Leona knew that timesheets would help them get clarity but the team was struggling to fill them in at the time they were working on each project and therefore entries and insights lacked accuracy.

The solution: using analytics to keep administrative tasks under control

Leona starts her workday by selecting the task which has the highest priority due to schedules or deadlines. She chooses one for the first half of the day and another one for the second half.

Tasks for other projects or administration tasks pop up and need to be taken care of instantly. Once they are done, she goes back to her priority task.

She tracks each task she is working and then compares billable vs non-billable hours and re-evaluates her priorities based on this accurate information.

Leona tracks her projects as billable and then all general office administration falls under non-billable. “If there is a specific billable item which needs to be tracked for a project I usually just add a note to the logged time.”

The outcome: learning from insights to optimize and prioritize

Timeular’s insights help the team of architects at Farnsworth Group see how much time they have spent on a specific task for either just a day (which is helpful for timesheets) and verify how much total time has been spent on a particular project. “This makes it easier to check if we’ve gone over our contracted work hours,” she says.

If administrative tasks are consuming more time, the team reviews what they might have done that day or week to inform how they can optimize their time to stay as productive as possible. “I decide whether or not it is an issue before taking action. Some days or weeks are heavy with company-based meetings and obligatory training sessions which really can’t be helped.”

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