How an independent consultant uses Timeular to boost productivity and profitability

Kasia Tang is an independent consultant who offers training for recruiters and managers. She helps ambitious companies source and attract the right person for the right role, helping them navigate the myriad tools to boost productivity along the way.

Challenge: not knowing where the time goes

As an independent and in-demand consultant, Kasia was keen to understand exactly how she spends her time – and on what activities – in order to help plan future work. Kasia struggled when a day slipped by that felt unproductive and she didn’t know where the time had gone.

“I felt like I wasn’t productive at all. It was very easy to get sucked in by social media instead of doing any meaningful work. I couldn’t recall later what I was doing. My calendar was technically filled in, but I knew that often it wasn’t actually the true representation of what I ended up doing.”

Solution: better planning based on time entries

Thanks to Timeular, Kasia is able to clearly see where her time goes and is better prepared when it comes to planning. She can use her previous time entries to be confident about how long it will take her to prepare for a conference. Kasia has a good understanding of the relationship between personal and professional development and time she spends delivering training. “This will allow me to chose the right deals and events in the future, where the ROI is high”, she says. Kasia tracks time using the Tracker, which helps her stay focused on the task at hand and stops her from getting distracted by things such as looking at her phone.

Kasia assigns activities to her Tracker including blogging, personal development, conference work and preparing training materials. She marks activities as billable so that she knows exactly how much to charge at the end of the month. Thanks to time tracking, Kasia knows how many hours a day is optimum for her work and this allows her to remain productive and stay focused throughout the day.

The outcome: increased profitability and productivity

Kasia has noticed that she is more profitable now that she uses Timeular as she is capturing all of the billable work she is doing and she can use the insights provided by Timeular to prioritize projects with the highest ROI.

Kasia has the following tips for effective time tracking:

1. Make sure you’re tracking the right activities (Kasia keeps them high level and uses tags and notes to add granularity)
2. Use the Tracker so that you don’t get distracted by your phone
3. Set aside 5-10 minutes every day to see how you did and think what you could do tomorrow to be more productive
4. Analyze time spent on activities vs the output (to really help boost productivity)