I selected this title because I felt a bit out of touch when I read this morning that 96% of people under 50 (I’m 49) have Facebook accounts that have been used in the past month. I don’t have one.
Ok, my wife Kate reminds me that I’m a little uptight even by accountant standards-but are there that many people really wasting that much time?
You can’t reclaim time spent so why is everyone goofing off so much? I have to admit that I cringe when I see my kids on Facebook. Really-you have nothing better to do than look at pictures of your friends and post “updates”?
Perhaps managing a professional services firm, where our main asset is time, makes me sensitive about this. In a good post by Synergy Business Solutions in Seattle, Michael Camp mentions that time is often your product and your nemesis.
For a professional services firm, there are a few main things to remember when tracking time.
1. Consultants billing clients should report 40 hours so you know what they are doing when they are not billing. Perhaps you would like them improving in a different way when not billing.
2. Record your time every day. People that record time only at the end of the week or every two weeks when billing occurs, end up recording “great works of fiction”.
Please listen to my podcast on this from a few years back. The products were Solomon and Great Plains back then rather than Dynamics SL and Dynamics GP, but the best practices are still good ones for tracking time.
A friend of mine, not from here in Minneapolis, reminded me “Youth is wasted on the young.” Positively stated, use your time well, build better habits with your time, keep track of your time and analyze it. You can impress even yourself with what you can accomplish over any stretch of time.
