Time is one of the most important elements of work, no matter what type of business you’re in. That’s why Time Timer is a crucial factor in our company’s success.
As the managing director of a small creative agency, I have to manage my time well. My duties include managing the day-to-day operations of our business, interacting with clients throughout the day, and working as a copywriter, a consultant, and in some cases, the creative director on various projects.
In the real world, as in the virtual world, time is a critically important element of our work. In some cases, that’s because we might be billing our clients on an hourly basis. In other cases, we might be working on a project-by-project basis; in those cases, the time we spend on each project is immensely important. For us to remain profitable, we have to keep our time on each project at a certain threshold. It’s almost impossible to overstate the importance of time when it comes to the work that we do every day.
About 10 years ago, some friends introduced me to Time Timer®. I was immediately impressed with it because, in the design-oriented world that I live in, I admire the simplicity and ingenuity of the product design. Working in visual mediums, I love being able to see something as simple as the red disk that disappears as the time elapses. It’s an elegant solution to a problem we all face: staying in control of your time.
Practically speaking, I use a few different Time Timer products in various ways throughout the day. I use a Time Timer next to my computer display to help keep me on track. If I’m writing a script, and I’m charging a client on an hourly basis, I need to make sure that stay within budget. It also just helps me work through my task list for the day. I know that I’ve got a number of things that I need to knock out before the end of the day, and so I will assign a little bit of time to each task.
Time Timer forces me— in a good way— to work through my task list in a way that is productive and efficient. It’s become so popular with my team that we use many of their products frequently, even just for our routine meetings. Whether it’s a project planning session or even just one of our weekly meetings, it’s always helpful to have that visual reminder of how much time we want to allocate to that meeting. Like everyone else, we need reminders to stay on track and not go off on too many tangents. After all, we need to stick as closely as possible to work that is actually billable.
The most recent Time Timer product that my team has incorporated into their daily use is the iOS app for iPad. In our business, we do a lot of video production work, and that kind of work needs to be on a very tight schedule, especially for a shooting day. So, if I know we’ve got 18 shots to get in a day, I know that I might not be able to spend any more than 30 minutes on any given setup before we can lock down the shot that we need, and move all of our gear to the next location. In such cases, the pressure is on, because I might have other people coming in for that shot or extras or talent that we hire. It’s really great to know, at a glance, how much time we have left. That’s tremendously helpful for our video shooting days in particular. And I love having it on my iPad.
But regardless of what type of work we are doing, time is critical. And, as they say, time is money. In short, when we use Time Timer, we become a more profitable business.
Written by Matt Chandler, Entrepreneur