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Time Efficiency Matters — Here’s How to Get it Right
Whether you’re paid on an hourly, daily or project basis, being efficient with your time is critical to your success. You’ve got to produce strong work in a reasonable amount of time if you’re going to maintain and grow your business. But time efficiency isn’t as easy as it sounds. With time sinks waiting around every corner to distract you and slow you down, working efficiently takes practice and dedication.
Here, we’ll take a look at what it means to be time efficient and why it’s so important. We’ll also offer five time efficiency tips to help you use your time as well as possible. (Spoiler alert: tracking your time on an app like Timing is a good place to start!)
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Die 11 besten Zeiterfassungs-Apps für Mac: Eine umfassende Kaufberatung
Hintergrundbild: César Couto; Icons: die jeweiligen App-EntwicklerWissen Sie wirklich, wie Sie Ihre Zeit verbringen? Wenn Sie zurückblicken auf ein gerade abgeschlossenes Projekt, haben Sie dafür wirklich die drei Stunden gebraucht, die Sie glauben, oder waren es vielleicht doch nur zwei Stunden – und die letzte Stunde haben Sie mit der Beantwortung von E-Mails verbracht? Der einzige Weg, sicherzustellen, dass Sie wissen, wie Sie wirklich Ihre Zeit verbringen, ist die Verwendung einer der elf besten Zeiterfassungs-Apps für Mac, die wir unten aufgelistet haben.
Die Wahl der richtigen App hängt davon ab, was Sie benötigen – jede App ist geringfügig anders. Während einige Ihre Aktivitäten automatisch erfassen und sorgfältig festhalten, welche Webseiten und Dokumente Sie verwenden, lassen andere Sie Ihre Zeit manuell protokollieren. Einige eignen sich besonders gut für Freelancer und kleine Unternehmen, während andere eher für größere Unternehmen entwickelt wurden.
Lesen Sie weiter für einen Überblick über den gesamten Markt der Mac-Arbeitszeiterfassungs-Apps im Jahr 2023!
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How to Log Work Hours for Yourself and Your Team
Image: Christina Morillo
One of the most fundamental yet vital parts of completing any project is accurately logging work hours. Whether working solo or managing a team, keeping track of hours is essential to ensure clients get billed correctly and meet compliance standards.
Fortunately, we live in an age where this process is more efficient and streamlined than ever, and you’re not stuck punching that antiquated time clock.
In this post, we’ll explain how to log work hours and helpful tools you can use to make it as simple as possible. We’ll also go over best practices and common mistakes so you get started on the right foot.
Let’s jump right in.
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Top 10 Time Management Tips: Work Less, Achieve More
Image: Firmbee.com
What constitutes a working week for most people? Does the old Monday to Friday, 9am to 5pm, norm still stand? Well, if the results of the world’s biggest four-day workweek trial are anything to go by: probably not. In fact, it’s likely safe to say that the working week revolution is underway. Now more than ever, businesses are using smart time management tips that can help professionals live more productive balanced lives.
The old nine-to-five workweek structure goes back over 200 years. So, it’s been due for a revamp for quite some time. Part of dismantling this system and implementing a new solution, however, has involved understanding how to manage time effectively.
Freelancers and professionals who need to bill time accurately have always understood the importance of effective time management strategies. The pandemic fuelled interest in this issue among broader business groups. We balanced our professional endeavors with our domestic commitments in increasingly blurred ways during the early 2020s. And as we did, we started to ask ourselves: are there time management tips that could help us do more and work less?
The answer is yes. Let’s dive in.
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Time Sink Be Gone: Find and Eliminate the Tasks that Waste Your Time
It can be hard to tell where the hours go sometimes. Your day starts off well enough, with only one meeting and a few seemingly achievable deadlines. But by the end of the day, you still haven’t ticked everything off today’s to-do list, and have only added to tomorrow’s. The culprit? One time sink after another, sneaking their way into your day.
The ramifications of losing minutes, hours, and sometimes even days to a time sink or two can be serious. Unless you stay on top of things, the quality of your work could suffer, you could miss out on opportunities, and your income could stall. It isn’t an exaggeration to say that a time sink that’s deep enough could affect the viability of your business.
Let’s take a look at what time sinks are all about, and how you can eliminate them, wrap up unfinished projects, boost your productivity, and ensure your business growth. (Psst: A time-management tool like Timing can help!)
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Increase Project Profitability with These 7 Simple Strategies
Image: Vlada Karpovich Project profitability is one of the essential factors in building a thriving business. It helps you determine 1) whether or not a client is worth your time, effort, and resources and 2) which clients to prioritize. Due to this, project profitability is one of the most “bottom-line” minded measurements and one you should learn how to calculate and use to maximize your revenue and fuel growth.
In this post, we’ll explain what project profitability is precisely, why it’s important, how to calculate it, and steps you can take to improve your profitability on a project basis. Let’s jump right in.
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Mac Keyboard Shortcuts: Your Key to Faster, More Efficient Work
As a Mac user, you likely spend a significant amount of time typing on your keyboard. While the mouse or trackpad is a useful tool for pointing and clicking, constantly moving your hand to use it can disrupt your workflow and slow down your productivity. This is where the best keyboard shortcuts for Mac come in handy. By memorizing and utilizing these shortcuts, you can streamline your workflow and accomplish tasks more efficiently.
According to this study, people waste an average of 2 seconds per minute by switching between mouse and keyboard — that’s 3% of your workday! Learning just one keyboard shortcut could save you several hours each year. And for those who work on a computer for eight hours per day, keyboard shortcuts can save up to 8 workdays per year. Not to mention the fact that using keyboard shortcuts can also make you happier, because you are less likely to be interrupted by having to navigate menus and can thus stay in a “flow” state for longer, which is known to be beneficial to work satisfaction.
In this article, we’ll explore some essential Mac keyboard shortcuts and provide tips on how to discover and remember them to boost your productivity, to help you be more efficient, productive and happy at work!
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9 Tips to Bill Time Accurately and Boost Your Bottom Line
Image: Wes HicksDoes your business bill time for each project? If so, you’ll know how important it is to track your time accurately. You need to know exactly how much time a particular project takes so that you can quote and invoice correctly, and you need to have a clear sense of whether you’re working productively or if there are more hours you could be billing.
There are countless businesses that operate this way. Those in the legal profession will be all too familiar with this approach, as will accountants, consultants and creatives, including copywriters, designers and developers. Freelancers across industries, who account for 36% of the workforce in the US, as well as agencies, regularly break their work down into hours and bill their time accordingly.
But even if you’re familiar with logging your time, are you sure you’re maximizing your billable hours? Are you working smartly and efficiently? Could you be billing more for your projects and boosting your bottom line? We’re here to offer some handy tips on making your time work for you, and to answer your questions, too.
Take a look at our comprehensive list of tips to help you bill for time — and develop a more successful business while you’re at it.
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Time Management Matrix: How to Focus on What’s Important
When we’re busy at work or in our personal lives, it’s easy to become overwhelmed by long lists of tasks. We often rush to check items off our to-do list, regardless of their value or timeline. This behavior feels like getting things done, even though not all tasks are the same, and most of them will never help us achieve our goals. But you can get past all that with the Time Management Matrix, which is also called the “Eisenhower Matrix”.
You see, productivity isn’t about working harder or longer – that’s poor time management. Yes, simply working more will cross more items off your list, but it rarely helps create real change in your life. That’s why productivity is more about doing the right things.
How do you work on the right tasks? With prioritization.
Prioritization seems simple, but it’s an advanced skill that few people do well. It’s hard to look at our work objectively and accept that some won’t happen, especially when we’re overwhelmed.
The Time Management Matrix is a powerful tool to organize your work based on importance and urgency. It helps you focus on the tasks that matter most and avoid the ones that don’t help you achieve your goals.
This article explains the Eisenhower Matrix, its advantages, who it’s for, and how it works. Then we offer some tips to use it well.
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Google Calendar Time Insights: A Comprehensive Guide (Updated 2023)
Image: Gaining VisualsHow much time do you spend in meetings every week? For many of us, it’s more than we would like to admit. But if you want to know for sure, it’s best to use a dedicated tool, like Google Calendar Time Insights. With the information this feature offers, you can assess whether meetings are occupying too much of your time, and make the necessary adjustments so that you can stay focused, improve your productivity, and enjoy a better work-life balance.
According to this article, 78% of workers believe their meeting schedules are chaotic, with 38% blaming upper management and 16% blaming their direct manager. An incredible 64% of employees are only excited about meetings when they’re well-planned, which isn’t always the case. If left ungoverned, meetings can often become long, tedious and unproductive, pulling people away from completing actual work.
Does this mean that all meetings are pointless? Absolutely not. Some are critical. Others add value, even if they’re not essential. And sometimes it is just nice to have a conversation with and bounce ideas off other humans, especially if you work remotely.
To stay productive and get the most value out of your work, however, it is important to determine how much time you’re spending in meetings, and to know which are important and which, quite literally, could have been an email.
Google Calendar Time Insights can help with this. It’s a simple tool that helps you track meeting times. Let’s take an in-depth look at how it works.
(Want to get some of your questions answered straight away? Simply skip to our frequently asked questions section at the end.)
