I do not envy the timekeepers at lawyer’s offices’, having to allocate 6-minute time blocks to each client correctly and accordingly. Although tedious, they ultimately get paid for every minute of their time – and shouldn’t we all? After all, we’re not here socialise, we’re here to solve problems and get the jobs done. Most of us go through several years at a university studying or earning a pittance to learn a trade so that one day we can land our dream job and get paid what we deserve. So what can we do to maximise our earning potential?
We all know that if we spotted a charge on an invoice reading ‘3 minutes spent reading emails on February 26th between 9:04 and 9:07’ we would seriously consider asking if this is a joke and where the hidden camera was. Although we may already be getting charged for ‘email reading’ time, it makes us feel better to see that time recorded against more productive tasks like ‘project management’.
Managing yours’ or your teams time effectively is key to running a profitable business. Even though your employees may be getting paid for their time, is your business earning that wage efficiently? It may not even be about the money goals; time management tools also lift productivity and reduce stress levels. If everyone one in your team is across each project’s status and who is responsible for moving the job forward there will be no more confusion and lost time figuring out who missed which email.
Here at Evolution, we don’t take ourselves that seriously. While we don’t bill by the minute, we admittedly envy those who can do so, rationally, we are on the other hand on a quest to be more efficient with our time. Over the past 4 months have been extensively searching for that one tool that will help us streamline what we’re doing and how we’re doing it, to hopefully reduce the amount of ‘email reading’ time allocated to each job.
Here are our top picks for time management and team collaboration tools:
Claiming to be ‘the world’s leading workflow platform’, InVision wins over the designer in me with a clean interface and prototyping abilities. The project management features allow you to see which phase of production each job is currently in at a glance, minimising your time spent writing to do lists or mentally ticking off jobs as they progress.
If you’ve got the cashola, I’m pretty sure Zoho will do your job for you. Looking through the add-on options for a Zoho plan is like choosing a flavour of cheesecake in the Cheesecake Factory – not an easy task. Although overwhelming, Zoho can assist your business no matter the industry, with all your project, accounting, CRM, time tracking, sales, reports and so much more.
Focusing on the workflow of development teams, Wrike is ‘built for you’. Although pricey, Wrike provides a solution that is perfectly built for design project management. The level of detail a user can add would surely push a project through its systems quicker than you can say ‘job complete’.
And the winner is……..
A great tool for us visualisers – an online dashboard that allows you to plan ahead visually and communicate effectively – what more could you want? Monday.com is built on flexibility, allowing you to make it your own – if only it did the work for you! The feature we love is the ability to have a project overview page where we can see which stage each job is at, no email filtering required! One major plus is the support team is ready and willing to help you with any query you may have.
As with any new system, it has taken a while to set ourselves up with Monday.com and get it working for us rather than with us. After a few quick emails and calls to the support team, we finally have a solution that is ticking pretty much all of our boxes. It has been an uphill battle to find that one, perfect, holistic, all-encompassing, brilliant solution. While we know our talented development team could create an industry leading, ‘does it all for you’ program that we can retire on, and maybe that day will come… Until then, Monday.com has our backs and we are loving the colourful interface (of course!).
