Working out where all the time goes to
22nd June, 2009 by Alick
Time flies. Here I am, wrapping up my day’s work when it suddenly occurred to me we’d not posted here for almost 2 weeks. This was never supposed to happen! Mind you, that’s because we’ve been pretty busy these last few weeks, one on finishing off some projects (a couple of e-commerce builds in our CMS) and two, on trying to establish more process around the business with the aim of helping us all work more productively.
This latter part, making the most of your resource, I think is one of the biggest challenges of running a small business. There’s always so much to do and there is never enough time. Having a laser focus on what’s important is key in addressing the ‘there’s too much to do’ part, but also, knowing exactly where the time goes in the first place is also important. The more clients and projects we take on, the more 5 minute jobs we seem to accumulate.
In the last post, Jo wrote about the new support tool we’d launched to help prioritise the ‘to do’ list. What we’ve now started to do is measure the time we take more granularly – and to do this we’re using toggl.com. Toggl is great. It’s free and you can sign up with a Google Account – with the premium versions having some nice tie ins to Google Calandar. Using Toggl you define your Clients. Clients have projects and projects spawn tasks. Tasks can be created by anyone who shares your workspace, and they manage these via a browser, or via a widget that’s available for Mac/PC/Linux. We’ve not yet plugged Toggl into billing, or used features such as the RSS output that, theoretically, could be used to communicate progress on projects to stakeholders or clients – but first up, it will give everyone a clearer idea of where the time goes and that in itself will provide some useful learnings. Like it took 18 mins and 8 seconds to write this post!
Based in Brighton and Hove, East Sussex, contact miggle.co.uk for website development, content management and online media services in the UK and worldwide.
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- Who do we hire at miggle?
- Launch of the new miggle support site – the easy way for our clients to request assistance
Tags: Brighton & Hove, business blog, East Sussex, miggle team, online careers