Making Time by Saving Time

(reducing keying-in by 50%)

Many of Time Manager‘s best ideas are the simplest. Like the new interface to and from MS Outlook.

Anyone who uses the MS Outlook/Exchange Calendar will probably have realized at some point that, actually, we’re all re-keying that data.

First we key-in the appointment (with a purpose or goal, the appointment date and duration as well as those attending). Fine; that’s a necessary job for anyone operating an organized diary. But then we then re-key that very same information on our Timesheets again, this time turning duration into time spent and the purpose or goal into the Project and Activity. But the point is we’ve entered the same data more than once, which is highly unproductive.

This is probably fine for the occasional entry, but imagine if you were an appointment-based enterprise, like, say, Human Resources or counseling. Or let’s just say you use the Calendar for projected work entering things that need to be diarised to be sure they get done (an under-used concept at the best of times!). Or perhaps you use the Calendar to create collaborative working meetings. All this needs to be re-keyed at the timesheet.

The fundamental difference is this: Calendar = things to be done in the future; Timesheet = things I have done.

But Time Manager recognizes that this is all just time. At the end of the day everything comes down to Staff (us), the Project (what is the end-goal of what we are doing), Activity (exactly what did we do, e.g. Meeting or Interview or collaborative Development etc.) and the time spent/or projected to be spent (duration).

By putting your appointments into the Time Manager first you have an alternative (and more user-friendly!) personal and Team diary interface. Nice, but not essential. But by extending this to import to and export from the MS Outlook calendar you can, if you must, continue to use the calendar exactly as you do but – wait for it – now you’ve passed the same data you would have typed plus a Project and Activity AUTOMATICALLY. This means that when the appointment date arrives (the future tense becomes the present and then past), you’ve also AUTOMATICALLY filled-in your timesheet.

Not only is this more efficient, it’s also greatly improves the accuracy of time data. Why else time record? We all know that if the deadline is Friday 4pm for timesheets, most will be keyed-in that afternoon, if not the following Monday, following a chase-up (Missing Timesheets). At that point days could have passed and when that happens people tend to have to rely on their own memory and make stuff up; thereby reducing the quality of the data collated. Now you can save time and improve accuracy at a stroke.

But what if things change or overrun? No problem. We already know that altering time events is easy in Time Manager (just drag/extend the chosen time block). Simples. In those appointment-orientated enterprises we’ve just halved your keying-in time without challenging established corporate practice (you can still defer to the Outlook calendar view if you wish – you’d never be able to tell which were keyed-in and which were imported). Now we’re even satisfying management and bureaucracy.

But, most importantly, we’re making time by saving it.