Time, the final frontier

Posted by The Practitioner on Tue, 27/09/2011 - 21:28 in Blogs 1312 1 comment | report

It seems to be the biggest issue for all accountants. It's something we have all learned to fear - and cherish. No, not money or success - I'm talking about ... time!

Get any group of accountants together and time management and timesheets inevitably come up in conversation.

It's not just a rare commodity, it's what many accountants base their charges on, and it's what we all need plenty of to get our work done.

It seems that no matter how many books I read on time management, how many courses I go on, I'm still very poor at it. And even if you don't keep timesheets, you need to maximise the time you have to get your work done. Ironically, it's interesting websites such as AccountingWEB and it's regular email newsletters that tend to soak up a lot of time. So better email and Internet discipline is a definite first step towards better time management. I know some people are able to turn off email for blocks of time every day, not sure if I could. We use it so much for internal communication, passing jobs and files between team members, so turning off Outlook between say 10am and 4pm would wreck a lot of our workflow procedures. Does anyone have a better suggestion?

As for timesheets, I'd love to ditch them but at the moment they seem to be the best management tool to track what we're doing and how efficient we are. The bottom line is the value of fees we generate each week or month. But what if we don't make the target? Time records serve a purpose to tell us who's not pulling their weight, which jobs are being done inefficiently, and where we have done additional work that needs to be billed where we do fixed fees. It works for us, anyway. How do firms that don't use timesheets control this stuff? There's clearly no industry-standard approach since none of the so-called "practice management" software companies produce anything for practice management that isn't basically a time and fees package!

Comments

Email Checking

MatthewSteeples | Fri, 14/10/2011 - 10:14 | Permalink

I got trapped in the same email cycle that you describe where as soon as an email comes in it is treated like the phone is ringing and it can't wait. I've managed to find a few techniques that help to solve this:

Use RSS for as many newsletters as possible. This means that I go to check them when I'm ready to read them rather than (hopefully AccountingWeb will open that up for their newsletters soon!)
Switch email checking off for small batches at a time. If you've got a task that's going to take you half an hour to do then close outlook for those 30 minutes and then deal with any new emails in a batch when you've done it. For the most part people won't mind if they have to wait a short amount of time (unless you were having an email conversation with them).
Use an instant messenger client (such as Skype or MSN) to communicate around the office and send files. Then you can set yourself to "busy" when you don't want to be disturbed but if something really important comes up then people can still get hold of you without ringing you. It also has the benefit that people can check your IM status before coming to see you in person (if you're in the same office) so may even mean you're disturbed less!

In this day and age point 2 also applies to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and whatever other social platforms you're a member of. If you find that it's taking up some of your time on a regular basis then I've found that setting aside time for it works better than just checking them on an ad-hoc basis.

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