Why You Need to Know How You are Spending Your Time
Time tracking is so important for building a successful business. It is the foundation on which all strong design businesses are based.
If you do not know where you are spending your time, you do not know where you are making or losing money.
Having accurate data in your business about how long it takes you to do something is also going to help when it comes to scheduling you and your team's week.
Let's look at this example.
You're writing down the tasks that you've got to get done this week and that's a mix of client work and business building work. You have to work on a concept design package and you've allocated yourself three hours for this work. You have a client meeting coming up that you need to have this work done for, and there's a deadline for some of the other work that you have scheduled into your calendar. So you've allocated three hours and that three hours is kind of based on a feeling that it'll take about that long to do that amount of work.
So you get into it - you start going and then the reality is that work takes you four and a half hours to finish.
Now to complete that work, you've had to miss out on doing something else - something that doesn't have a client-related deadline attached to it.
Maybe something like your social media planning, your business strategy, some accounting and bookkeeping stuff.
By not knowing how long something is gonna take you to do, you haven't allocated your time correctly.
The other thing that this leads to is you are now stressed because you actually don't have that extra hour and a half in your day to work on that item. It may mean that you have to work at night or you just need to move things around more.
Now, let's go back a step and see what happens if we are basing our decisions around time tracking and how we are allocating our time based on data.
We're now at the beginning of the week and we know that we've got this concept
package that we need to work on. We've tracked our time across the last couple of projects we've been working on, we can go into our time tracking system (More Time to Design does this well), and pull up reports on the last three projects of a similar size and scope that you have worked on. I can see based on that data that it took me 4 hours for one, four and a half for another and 4 hours on the other project. Now I can accurately schedule out my time and allocate four hours for that concept package work.
Now what happens is you've allocated yourself adequate time to do that task and you can adequately schedule out time to do your business planning, your social media or whatever other task that you've got to do that week.
You’re not having to cancel that work. You’re not having to move that work. Your week is running smoothly.
It also means that you are going to be charging your client, whether that is a value-based fee or an hourly fee, you are charging them accurately. Because you’re not basing your fee proposal on a feeling or a rough kind of back of the envelope calculation.
This is why I feel so strongly about time tracking. It is not the only thing you need to be doing in your business but it is one of the foundational things you need to be doing to ensure that you are building a strong business.
Now, there are multiple ways of tracking your time but it is important that you track it in a way that you can easily pull data from it and pull reports. For example, in More Time to Design, you are able to pull reports across projects, clients, staff members, tasks and project stages.
So you could easily say, “I want to look at the last 10 projects that I've worked on in this time period and I wanna see how long I've worked on Project Stage 1 across all of those.”
It also allows you to see how you are spending the majority of your time. It allows you to see what parts of your business are profitable and what parts are not.
The other reason why it's so important to be tracking your time is that when you come to scale up your business - and grow your staff numbers, you are going to accurately know how much work you're going to need to take on to support that staff member. You're going to know how much to accurately allocate to that staff member. It all comes back to being able to make data-driven decisions.
The other reason why I think time tracking is so important is because it allows you to work out how much work you need to take on to achieve your income goals.
For example, say you go, “I want to make in the next six months. I wanna bring in $60,000 in revenue.” Obviously, there are different ways you can segment that pie but you can also go, “Okay, I know I have 35 hours in my week and if I allocate out those weeks I will know that I can accommodate this many hours of work across this many projects. Does that allow me to get to my revenue goal or do I just simply not have enough hours at the rate that I'm charging
to meet that revenue goal?
It's really important that you are time-tracking. It influences so many parts of your business and it is a key to making sure you are running a profitable design business.
I hope you understand a little bit more about why I think time-tracking and making database decisions are so crucial and such a fundamental foundation for your business. Whether you are just starting out or you've been in the industry and you've had your studio for a while, it is never too soon to start tracking your time.
Here is how MTTD can help with your general manager mindset making sure that your systems and processes are in place.
Listen to our podcast The Design Dialogues Podcast where we talk each week about how to run a successful interior design business
Learn with our The Process courses which take you set by step through what to do to run a successful interior design project.
Book a Health Check to have Beth personally look over your business systems and processes.
Use MTTD, the tool designed by Beth Bieske (interior designer + general manager) to run your interior design studio