How does Timeular help Sarah find time to work on her most important tasks?
Ever wondered how much of your time is spent in meetings? Read on to discover how Sarah quantified it and how she’s finding time for the important things.
Sarah Bushland works as an IT project manager at a software development company, providing software as a service for people with special needs and disabilities. Facing a multitude of daily tasks which required constant switching led her to question how much time she actually spent focusing on the right things. This led her to search for a solution to show exactly where her time was spent. Enter Timeular.
Numbers that tell you what to do: find time for important things
Sarah spends her day answering emails, managing her projects, making sure the development team is progressing, working on the stories she assigned herself to, interviewing new hires for her team and joining meetings. That’s why she tracks Meetings, Interviews & Recruiting, Projects, Jira (Scrum), Unplanned, Break, and Email.
Recording her time showed her the following insights:
- 31.4% Projects
- 29% Meetings
- 13% Email
- 11% Interviews & Recruiting
- 10% Scrum
- 5% Breaks
- 0.13% Unplanned
Seeing her analytics in the Timeular time tracking app made her realize that she was spending way too much time on Meetings and too little time on breaks. Wasting so much time in meetings meant less time to work on development – which she’d love to focus more on.
Too much time spent in meetings? Time for change
To shift her time to other tasks, Sarah scheduled fewer meetings and replaced them with emails where it made sense. To do so, she asked herself “Could this have been solved with a quick conversation or email?” and replaced the meeting if it was a yes.
“If I had a meeting, I time-boxed them to end the meeting early, but get the agenda accomplished.”
Furthermore, detecting that 1/10 of her time went to interviewing made her pushing her recruiting efforts back to Human Resources and hence freed up more time for her important tasks.
“It’s crucial to identify if a task is aligned with your responsibilities and if there is something you could be delegating or working with the person in charge. It’s about learning to say NO when it’s appropriate.”
TIP: Read our free guide about time blocking: what is, benefits and how to do it.
The outcome
Spending less time on meetings, more time on breaks and delegating her recruitment tasks to the department that is actually responsible for it helped Sarah having more time for her development tasks. In addition to that, Sarah found herself using the Timeular Tracker as a way to start a conversation. “It plants the seed in other people’s minds that they may need to re-evaluate how they spend their time too.”
Saving time and increasing productivity are some of the benefits that time tracking provides to Sarah.