Happy weekend friends and fans! I hope that some of you are spending this weekend enjoying some down time! This week’s user interview on time management and how vital it is to a successful business is with Carena Pooth of Pooth & Associates Business Advisors, located in the Hudson Valley of New York State.
Carena established her private consulting practice in 2001 and has helped business owners across a broad spectrum of industries increase profits and achieve a greater work / life balance. (That sounds delightful to us!) Her approach and proposed solutions are tailored specifically to the needs of each client, who see Carena as their go-to mentor and informal partner, providing a sounding board and coaching whenever needed – running the gamut from business planning to marketing to just helping clients problem solve at the highest level.
During her earlier corporate career, Carena managed teams of up to 300 people, turnaround projects spanning multiple companies, and $100 million budgets. As a C-level executive, she was instrumental in strategic planning and company wide policy development, project management, and business process improvement. As the Executive Chair of the Entrepreneurial Excellence Business Forum of the Hudson Valley, she now offers workshops for small business entrepreneurs. Carena lives by two fundamental principles in her professional as well as her personal life: Never compromise your integrity, and always put people first.
How important is time management in the day-to-day running of your business AND your life?
Time management is absolutely critical for anyone who juggles a lot of things. For me, it’s especially important not to let anything fall through the cracks, whether it’s an appointment or a work deliverable.
Talk to me specifically about OfficeTime. What’s been your biggest takeaway of using it?
I started using Office Time 3 years ago, when I was doing some freelance writing in the education field and I wanted to figure out whether it was worth it. (It wasn’t, and I dropped that gig pretty fast after that!) Once I saw how easy it was to set up and use, I started usingOfficeTime for all my consulting work. I really like the simplicity of it – no big learning curve and it takes just a few clicks and keystrokes to record a task or get a report. Ease of use is a huge plus.
So what new and awesome thing have you been able to create in your business, since you’ve freed up so much time with theOfficeTime time tracking tool?
Well, you have to understand that one of my clients describes me as “disgustingly organized,” and I’ve always done pretty well with my time management. But OfficeTime has made it easier to control my overly perfectionistic tendencies, in other words, not to spend too much time on any single work item once the required level of quality has been met.
Time management is one of the most common struggles cited by my clients. We all know that time logs have been around forever, but a handwritten log is such a hassle that very few people bother with one unless they are required to by their company, or unless time logging is part of a scientific or professional protocol they need to follow. So most people just have no idea how they actually spend their time, and asking them to write their activities in a log usually is a dead end.
OfficeTime, on the other hand, makes it so easy to keep a time log that almost anyone can be persuaded to do so. When my clients tell me they have time management issues, I suggest to them that they start using OfficeTime as a first step to understanding how they spend their time and why there never is enough of it. Because it is so painless, most of those who start using OfficeTime for this purpose eventually take the next step and integrate it into their day to day business operations.
Suggesting OfficeTime to colleagues and partners – that is music to our ears! Thank you Carena!
Time. The real commodity.
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