Continuing with our user profiles, this week we are thrilled to feature Karen Kirtland, from Natural Resources Assessment, a biological consulting firm specializing in conducting biological assessments for projects. California has numerous state regulations that direct development of properties, among those regulations are requirements for determining if a proposed development will directly or indirectly affect any protected plant and animal species and their habitats. Natural Resources conducts various field surveys for those species and habitats, including walking, trapping, visual auditory and habitat evaluation surveys. The findings of their work must then be written up into detailed reports for public presentation and review. Depending upon the particular work required, and the urgency of the project, their workday often extends throughout the entire night.
How important is time management in the day-to-day running of your business AND your life?
Our contracts are mostly time and expense based, meaning that we bill on an hourly basis rather than on task completion. Time management is critical to ensure we do not overrun our budgets, as well as essential to determining whether the time spent on a give task is in fact accurately estimated. The same is true for expenses, especially when such expenses are incurred as a result of out-of-office stays.
Time management is important to me personally. Having to ensure efficient use of my work hours has emphasized the high value of my personal time, and caused me to look at how my personal hours are best spent for me.
Talk to me specifically about OfficeTime. What’s been your biggest takeaway of using it?
Where do I start? The ability to simply click on a button and have the program track my time. Being able to start and stop work on various tasks and projects throughout the day, such as dealing with clients, addressing questions from colleagues and answering email, while tracking every individual effort simply by starting the clock and entering a few brief notes. Just being able to determine what projects I worked on without having to make extensive hand notes is a great asset.
In addition, being able to track time so that at the end of every day, every week, every month, knowing where my time went without having to ask: “Now, what did I do today?” has saved me time and frustration.
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?
I don’t know about new and awesome things, since I have been in business a long time and have already created most of what I need. If I had to answer, the most new and awesome thing I have been able to create is time to relax, to quit working and go dreaming. I used to spend long hours documenting my days, searching through calendars, email messages, computer files, and hand notes, making sure that when the client was billed that they knew what I had done with their money. Now, it’s all there on OfficeTime.
As head of the company, I have come to appreciate the value of my time, and to resent spending it in fruitless or frustrating tasks. OfficeTime reduces, not to say eliminates, waste. Talk about a real OfficeTime-saver.
Helping our users remain productive, flexible and successful. That’s what we like to hear!
Time. The real commodity.
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