Anne Currie – Company Director

Anne Currie is a director of workingProgram Limited. Anne divides her time between product management, product development, support, marketing and sales. She wanted to use Qlockwork to find more hours in the day! This is what she learned.

The Problem

Anne wanted to understand how she was spending her time, and find out whether there was a way she could get more done with the time she had.

Below is a report produced by Qlockwork for a normal day for Anne (the 15th September 2006). This report shows how much time she spent in each of the applications she used.

E-mail reading

The first thing that struck Anne was how long she spent reading email and browsing the web. Surely these were not effective uses of her time! So, she accessed the detailed section of her reports to find out more about her email reading habits. (Names and email addresses have been changed to protect the innocent).

You may notice that each of Anne's activities is also labeled with a "project" (critical or supportive). She used these project labels to mark how important each task was.

Anne saw that on a normal day she would look at her inbox between 10 and 15 times. Each time, she would handle new emails – even if they weren't particularly critical to her job.

Web browsing

Next she reviewed her web browsing.

Again, Anne noticed that she often looked at the web throughout the day, and browsed the web for information that, although generally useful, was not critical to the work that she had to do.

The Solution

After reviewing an average week, Anne made two decisions.

• She would review her inbox at fixed times of the day only – first thing, after lunch and at the end of the day.
• She would only browse the web when it was absolutely necessary to her task – the web was too distracting and time-consuming to use casually.

After putting these rules into place, she kept rechecking her activities to ensure she didn't fall back into bad habits. The 21st December is a typical day after Anne had put her rules into place.

By reviewing her email only at set times, she halved the time she spent handling email. She also nearly halved the time she spent online, though still felt she could improve further by being more disciplined.