How an architecture firm uses Timeular to prioritize projects and capture billable time

Leona is a Senior Architect at Farnsworth Group. The team use Timeular to understand how much time they are spending working on projects and use the insights to learn how best to prioritize their workload.

The challenge: juggling tasks without knowing how much time they are taking up

The architecture team at Farnsworth Group juggle multiple projects at a time and also need to keep on top of administrative tasks on the side. Leona and her team were struggling to know exactly how much time they were spending on each task and therefore didn’t know which ones to prioritize or how to optimize the time spent on each project.

Leona knew that timesheets would help them get clarity but the team was struggling to fill them in at the time they were working on each project and therefore entries and insights lacked accuracy.

The solution: using analytics to keep administrative tasks under control

Leona starts her workday by selecting the task which has the highest priority due to schedules or deadlines. She chooses one for the first half of the day and another one for the second half.

Tasks for other projects or administration tasks pop up and need to be taken care of instantly. Once they are done, she goes back to her priority task.

She tracks each task she is working and then compares billable vs non-billable hours and re-evaluates her priorities based on this accurate information.

Leona tracks her projects as billable and then all general office administration falls under non-billable. “If there is a specific billable item which needs to be tracked for a project I usually just add a note to the logged time.”

The outcome: learning from insights to optimize and prioritize

Timeular’s insights help the team of architects at Farnsworth Group see how much time they have spent on a specific task for either just a day (which is helpful for timesheets) and verify how much total time has been spent on a particular project. “This makes it easier to check if we’ve gone over our contracted work hours,” she says.

If administrative tasks are consuming more time, the team reviews what they might have done that day or week to inform how they can optimize their time to stay as productive as possible. “I decide whether or not it is an issue before taking action. Some days or weeks are heavy with company-based meetings and obligatory training sessions which really can’t be helped.”