Journyx Project Management Blog

The most obvious issue about social media: Is this a useful way to spend your time, or is it a sinkhole of attractive distraction? It could very easily be one of those one minute, and the other the next! It all depends on why you’re doing it, and this must be evaluated moment to moment. It’s an important distinction to make for yourself, because focus is probably your greatest asset that you can control. You must be judicious about where you place it and what you let grab it, thus reducing your effectiveness.

Bear in mind that the most potentially productive activities (e.g. meetings) can undermine your control and focus if they’re not carefully managed. And some pursuits that are commonly viewed as “time-wasting,” such as random Web surfing or Facebook socializing can be productive, if you use that term in the broadest sense of achieving something you want… read more

Focus is a word I have learned a great deal about in the past couple of years. For the past seven years I have been a consultant working at a variety of companies, writing for ProjectConnections, working on a variety of conferences, serving on the boards of a couple non profits, and even starting up a couple of different businesses. Not to mention writing a book, being a husband and father, and caring for a 15 acre “ranch” that includes several horses, dogs, and cats. Needless to say, I had a lot of irons in the fire.

The ironic thing is the more things that were on my plate, the more things I tended to add. While it seemed counterintuitive I was falling into the trap that many have fallen into – thinking that we are most effective when we are really busy. I was involved in a lot of things I enjoyed, but by having so many things going on, I was not paying enough attention to any of them. I was doing what I needed to get done, but I did not feel terribly satisfied with any of the results I was doing.

Last July I realized that I needed to follow my own advice that I often sited when talking about project prioritization – Get More Done By Doing Less. By focusing on a limited few activities at one time, you can actually get things accomplished quicker and then move on to the next item.

Read more at ProjectConnections.

So, I think of writing here everyday and remember promising myself that I will write 2 articles a month.

I haven’t. I come back to the site and see articles everywhere and I am lost. Amidst so much information am not sure what I can write about. I am far from being an expert on project management; Iam simply trying to be one.

After a while I wonder how people manage their time and do so much within the same 24 hours. I am reading “Beyond Code”, a book by Rajesh Setty and its fascinating because the author talks about how time is the equalizer- everyone has their share of 24 hours and how you use it, makes you different.

Bingo -Time Management it is. It is something all of us (aspiring project managers) should know. I read quite a few site and blogs and come across lots of people like Elizabeth Harrin writing in more than one site. Amazing I tell myself- how on earth do they have the time to do so much?

So, here’s my list of things every aspiring Project Manager should do -

* Network - You can save time by not having to physically meet people, use social networking sites and blogs. An email, IM and a phone call can be your time saving answer to the old world- drive and meet for lunch.

Read the rest of the article at pmStudent.com.

There’s one Twilight Zone episode that features Burgess Meredith as Henry Bemis, a henpecked, bullied man who seeks nothing more in life than time alone to read his books. By the end, nuclear war wipes out everyone else on the planet, finally giving him the time he so desperately craved. Yet, in classic Rod Serling style, Henry’s thick glasses break right before he can read even a simple word. Irony.

I always felt really sorry for that guy. Perhaps there is a bit of Henry Bemis in all of us. No, not being the only person left alive on earth… Rather, desperately wishing that we could find the time to do X, Y and Z. As everyone asks what we’d like for [insert the Winter Solstice holiday of your choice here], some of us are continually wishing we could ask for the gift of time.

There’s an old saying: “Mind the pennies and the dollars will take care of themselves.” I think this little proverb can be extended to time: “Mind the minutes and the hours will take care of themselves.” Believe it or not, something small like starting to account for where you spend your time can make an enormous difference when you have major tasks that need to be done. For example, you might find that the time it takes to delete all of your spam email adds up after a while, or that a task you have been doing as a favor to a colleague is detracting from other, more important projects. To complete the analogy, time tracking is like Henry’s glasses – such a simple thing is all that’s needed to see clearly.

- April Boland, Journyx Communications Coordinator

Recession fears abound today. Executives worry about their bottom line while employees worry about their jobs. At times like these, some companies resort to harmful measures like laying off employees and reducing spending on crucial programs. This might seem like a good idea at first, until the recession ends and they find that they have less talent to work with and no strategy for growth. Fortunately, there is a better way to cut costs intelligently and keep your business successful in good times and bad. All it takes is insight into which customers and projects are most profitable, allowing companies to focus on the most profitable work.

Understanding Profitability

It seems like a simple solution, but it is one that is often overlooked. Think about it: How many executives at your company really know which projects were successful? Which clients were profitable and which ones were a drain on resources? How many employees worked on each project, and for how long?

Having this information in hand while planning future projects and budgets empowers executives to make much more informed, cost-saving decisions. If you don’t know which projects were on-time and on-budget, you don’t know which projects were successful and should be replicated.

When your employees track their time on a per-project basis, you will get a red flag when projects are in trouble much earlier, giving you the opportunity to do something about it before it is too late. You can also learn the truth about projects that are consuming more labor hours than you thought, or customers you deemed expensive who are actually cheap to service. When the economy is down, this gives you the option to “fire” your unprofitable customers and keep the profitable ones happy.

The Result

If your developers, support staff, marketing team and salespeople all knew which customers were making money for you and which were not, they would alter their behavior in order to make the company more profitable. This gives you an enormous advantage over your competitors during a recession. After all, you know where your profits are coming from and they don’t. You can eliminate the unprofitable work and calculate ROI on anything with ease. When you need to cut, you will be able to cut intelligently. Though the economy continually changes, having strong processes in place to understand per-project profitability is the key to weathering any financial storm.

- Curt Finch, Journyx CEO

As a topic, time management is about as exciting as watching flies buzz around a no-pest strip. But would you be interested in learning about time management from someone with only months to live?

The time management expert in this case was Randy Pausch, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon who passed away on July 25 at age 47 from pancreatic cancer. Along with his now-famous “last lecture” about achieving your childhood dreams, Pausch also delivered a lively, inspiring speech on time management to the University of Virginia School of Engineering and Applied Science in November 2007. You can watch a video of the lecture or read the transcript.

Pausch’s comments weren’t revolutionary, and he admitted to adapting some of his points from Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and Kenneth Blanchard and Spencer Johnson’s The One Minute Manager.

But Pausch’s talk combined practicality, compassion and self-effacing humor, peppered with the wisdom and bravery of a man whose days were numbered. I highly recommend his speech to anyone who feels time-starved—and who doesn’t these days?

By now you’re probably wondering why I’m writing about Pausch and his speech in a column called “Mobile Computing.” The reason: Efficient time management is especially challenging for mobile professionals. You spend a lot of time in airports, in the air, or driving long distances. In addition to these time constraints, you’re got the constant waves of e-mail, voice mail, and other interruptions everyone else has. So it’s more challenging—and therefore more important—for mobile professionals to maximize their time. If you don’t, you forfeit time you could have spent with people you love, something Pausch understood all too well.

Read the entire article at CIO.com.

Check out a new podcast interview with Journyx CEO Curt Finch over at the Employee Benefit Adviser’s Audio Arena. In the interview, Curt discusses relevant issues like how companies can cut costs during a recession without losing valuable people and projects, and how time tracking helps both individuals and businesses of all sizes.

We grow ‘em big here in Texas. Honestly, it was the size of my forearm.

It’s leap week. By which I mean the week that contains February 29th. We only get this extra February day once an olympiad and I’ve always felt that it really should be observed as a holiday. Every business should be closed this one day out of every four years. No furniture sales, no floral deliveries. Nothing outside of emergency medical care.

On this one special day, everyone should be allowed to focus on what they are most passionate about. Reading, playing guitar, restoring that classic car out in the garage, gardening. Whatever that one thing that you never have quite enough time for is, you should be allowed this one day to dedicate your time to it. It’s a pipe dream, to be sure. But wouldn’t it be nice?

Ah well. Dreams aside, I thought I’d make my first report on the great time boxing experiment. The first thing I have to admit is that I’m doing a terrible job of using any sort of official form or policy to enforce the time boxing. I’m just a little too informal by nature for that sort of thing, I’m afraid.

That said, the good news is that I’ve embraced the concept thoroughly and I’m making it work on a somewhat intuitive level. Case in point: Last Sunday my wife and I needed to get to the community garden to set her plot set up for planting (this is Texas, spring comes early). Neither of us really wanted to put down the Sunday Times, get up from the couch and go shovel… compost. But I knew that if we didn’t do it, then it simply wouldn’t get done. Worse, the window for it would slip by completely and we’d be terribly unhappy that we’d been lazy.

So we turned to the magic of time boxing. We agreed that we’d spend exactly one hour working at the garden. We’d get as much composting done as we could and then we’d walk away, at least for the day. And you know what? We got 80% of the plot covered, on top of some weeding and general cleanup. In the end we went over our hour by about 20 minutes, but that’s fine. In fact, that’s one of the hopes inherent in time boxing for tasks you just don’t want to do – that you’ll get into it and get even more done than you would have without that built-in limit. Sure, we didn’t finish the project, but we got a hell of a lot more done than we would have by simply not going. Or, frankly, than we would have if we hadn’t known that we were going to stop at a certain point. Believe me, I’m lazy enough about stuff like this that if we’d made ourselves go with the intent of working until we were done, I’d have dragged my feet for hours.

Now, imagine taking this approach to those annoying tasks at the office. You may not wind up with zucchinis as big as your forearm, but you’ll get stuff done. And that should help you have enough time for the things that you really want to do.

-Andrew Trent, Journyx Director of Web Content

And now for a variation on our regularly scheduled “Mondays with Curt,” here is a link to the Student Operated Press, where Judyth Piazza had a chat with our fearless leader.

The two discussed issues like project accounting and time management, as well as some of Curt’s philosophies on business, technology and leadership.

Okay, it’s January. But it’s now late enough in the month that all those New Year’s resolutions have likely melted away like ephemeral icicles in the Texas sun. Alright, maybe not for you, but definitely for some people. Like me.

In any case, this is my favorite time of the year to make real efforts at change. When all the glow and shine is off and things are starting to get back to normal. In other words, when no one is looking.

This year, as befits someone who works with timesheet software for a living, I’m going to approach my problems with time management. And I’m going to do it with time boxing. I’m not the sort who can dive whole-heartedly into a complete Getting Things Done methodology (I know, I’ve tried) – but time boxing I think I can get into. If nothing else, it will help me address my chronic near-ADD. It’s not really diagnosable ADD, of course, but a propensity for feeling soul-crushing boredom with whatever task I’m actually working on. I know that something more interesting is out there, just waiting for my attention, but normally I’m too bloody-minded to break my work up in the way that time boxing pushes you to.

To help me on my way to a time boxing title, I’m going to be using David Seah’s Emergent Task Planning form, which comes from his excellent Printable CEO Series.

Now if this works, I’ll finally have time (and focus) enough to take up that other pursuit I’ve been meaning to look into… Kickboxing.

-Andrew Trent, Journyx Director of Web Content