Continuing with our user profiles, this week we are thrilled to feature Celia Poehls, Senior Integration Consultant in Professional Services at Siemens. Celia is hard working, amazingly articulate, left AND right brained, and definitely one of our favorite users.
Tell us about company, Celia, and about the services you provide.
I work in professional services at Siemens. I am member of a team of 35 people providing business and technical consulting as well as implementing interface and interoperability solutions for hospitals, clinics and other health care providers. To sum it up, I am very busy.
How important is time management in the day-to-day running of your business AND your life?
Keeping track of what I am working on and how long I’m working on it is essential. My open project list always hovers at 30 to 40 projects all with different status levels. On any given day I could be coding a map, writing documentation, involved in a conference call or any other number of professional activities. I do not have the temperament or desire to be the minute minder as well. I just want to do the work, not be the watcher from Whoville. (Hah, we like that.)
Talk to me specifically about OfficeTime. What’s been your biggest takeaway of using it?
The functionality is the first benefit that comes to mind. There are many days when I will start one task only to be interrupted by an IM or call from a customer. It is easy to suspend the tracking for the first activity and track a second or third, or sometimes even a fourth task. OT was also so easy to start using. It just quietly runs there in the background doing its thing with never a peep of discontent. All my energy is absorbed solving issues with SQL or HL7 or TCP or Web Services or DICOM or, you get the idea, so the last thing I want to do is track my work too.
I’ve also learned how flexible OT is. I recommended to one of my colleagues and she uses it very differently than I do. We still have the same result. We are still easily able to focus on the task(s) at hand and also keep track of what we did, and more importantly, report that time.
So what new and awesome thing have you been able to create in your business, since you’ve freed up so much time with the OfficeTime time tracking tool?
For me it is the aggregate of many small things together rather than some large big bang. Frequently, it’s a miracle to get to the end of the day with something productive to show for it. With OT watching my back I am consistently able to focus on what my employer and my customers need. I know that by the end of the week, I will have a record of what I did I can port to our internal tracking system and then have the weekend to relax and refresh my mind. As a technical person who works “under the covers” of what many an end-user experiences, I know just how marvelous this seemingly simple application is. I must devote so much brain power to my everyday work I appreciate having great applications which just work and work well.
Any final thoughts? Using OT provides an additional checkpoint for follow ups and checkins. For people like me who work in a billable hours world, recording time at the end of every week, I roll through all my projects. It is a good second check if I have missed someone with my other tracking mechanisms.
Helping our users remain productive, flexible and successful. That’s what we like to hear!
Time. The real commodity.
OfficeTime.net