Spy on yourself with this innovative new program.
One of the fun things about writing this column is that I get paid to
surf the Web and look for new and better ways to do things. I get to
preview technology before it is widely adopted. I wrote about my less
than exhilarating experience with Web cams five years ago, reviewed
Palms and Pocket PCs around the turn of the century and played with Web
conferencing long before the term Web-ex became part of the English
language.
And over the years, I've come across some great little tools, like
Nelson Email Organizer, an Outlook add-on that sorts and searches your
e-mail; Anagram, another Outlook add-on that automatically imports
contacts and appointments from e-mails and other documents to save you
keystrokes; and Roboform, an add-on for Internet Explorer that
remembers all your passwords for different Web sites and fills them in
for you. These, along with the Google toolbar for Internet Explorer,
are among my favorites because they save you time and make your life
easier.
But over the past couple of years there has been so much to write about
in the industry-financial planning applications and portfolio
management software as well as practice management and marketing-that I
have not looked for any neat little tools that you could use to improve
your computing experience.
Then, two weeks ago, I received a call from Tracy Beckes, a very smart
coach to advisors, and she asked me if I had any time-saving new
programs that I could share with her because she was collecting such
ideas for an advisor conference presentation. I was embarrassed that I
almost had nothing for her. So for the first time in a while, I spent a
couple of weeks looking beyond the advisor world for new tools likely
to help advisors save time and money. And that was how I found a cool
new tool for time management called Qlockwork.
Qlockwork Basics
I was surfing Google's financial advisor blogs when I came across a British blog, Philip Calvert's Electronic Marketing Guide For Financial Advisors. Calvert mentioned Qlockwork and quoted the company's marketing materials saying it "automatically records how you spend every five minutes of your day," but he had not actually tested the software yet. Curious, I followed the link to www.workingProgram.com, home of the start-up company that provides Qlockwork. I downloaded the program and without reading any documentation-if you need documentation to get started, it's not good software-in minutes I was using Qlockwork.
Qlockwork is a new program, and London-based workingProgram was founded in April 2006. Anne Currie, a co-founder, and her partner are the only full-time employees, and the company is self-funded. It now has 100 users, but the software is being tested by employees of two companies. One company with tens of thousands of employees is testing it with 30 employees, and the other company, with a few thousand employees, has about 20 employees testing it.
Qlockwork let's you spy on yourself to see how you are wasting your time. It has potential to improve productivity throughout your firm, provided you figure out a way not to make your employees think you're monitoring them too closely.
Qlockwork is an Outlook add-on program. When you install the program, a
menu item is added to Outlook in between "Actions" and "Help," and a
button is added to your Outlook toolbar that says, "Refresh Qlockwork."
When you refresh Qlockwork, the program gathers data about what you've
been working on.
Qlockwork shows you in five-minute increments what applications you
were active in and important details about what you were doing. It is
displayed in a separate calendar in Outlook that can run next to or
instead of your normal Outlook calendar. It shows you not only that you
used Microsoft Word from 9:45 a.m. to 10:15 a.m., for instance, but
also tells you what documents you were working on. It works the same
way for PowerPoint slide shows and Excel spreadsheets. In addition to
telling you what Microsoft Office files you used, it also tells you
what you did on the Web. It will tell you that you used Internet
Explorer from 10 a.m. to 11 a.m., for instance, and what Web sites you
visited. In addition, if it takes you five minutes to draft an e-mail,
Qlockwork displays the subject of the e-mail in your calendar.
The program runs in your System Tray, which is the little box in the
lower right hand corner of a PC that displays the icons of programs
always running in the background that are always ready for you to use.
You really want to be choosy about what programs you allow to run in
your System Tray because they eat up resources and can slow down your
computer's performance. But Qlockwork seems like a worthwhile one.
Every five seconds, Qlockwork asks your PC what you are working on. If
you are writing an e-mail but referencing a document on the Web,
Qlockwork will tell you what your principal activity is. In other
words, since you're spending more five-second increments writing the
e-mail than you are referencing the Web site, Qlockwork gives you an
accurate report of what you are really doing.
Billing Assistance
Currie, a cofounder of London-based workingProgram, says that financial advisors can use Qlockwork to be sure they are billing clients properly. For advisors who are paid by the hour, such as members of the Garrett Planning Network, this could be especially helpful. Professionals who bill by the hour usually use time-tracking software that records how long they are spending on a client matter. With such software, when you begin working on client John Smith's financial plan, you click a button to tracking your time, and when you finish working on Smith's case you click again to stop recording your time.
While that sounds good in theory, it's easy to forget to start and stop
tracking your time on a client case. Moreover, with PCs becoming a
hotter medium with more distractions, people are forced to multitask.
When switching from one task to the next, it's easy to forget to turn
on and off your billing software.
Currie says Qlockwork can ensure you don't let lost client minutes get
away from you if you make mistakes when using billing software. You
simply check Qlockwork's report against your billing software report to
be sure you're not forgetting to bill for any time.
But what if you are paid based on assets under management or on
commissions? In those cases, you probably would not get a direct
benefit from Qlockwork. Or would you? Let's say you are like many
advisors and don't charge a separate fee for making financial plans.
You look at your report at the end of a week and see that you spent two
days of your time in NaviPlan or MoneyTree working on a single client's
financial plan. Or you could run one of Qlockwork's other reports that
tells you what applications you use over a one-month period, and you
may see that you are spending 25% of your time in your planning
software. That could be a revelation. Sometimes in working day to day
to get things done you lose track of how you are spending your time,
and that's where a program like this could come in handy.
Employee Time Management
Whether Qlockwork can be a tool you implement business-wide is another
matter. Employees are sure to feel threatened about monitoring their
activities so closely. Spyware programs that allow you to monitor your
staff's activities on their computers are available and affordable. But
not disclosing to your employees that you are monitoring them is asking
for trouble. Employees are likely to resent it if you secretly monitor
their keystrokes. In addition, with all the Spyware on the Web,
employees could download a program that detects you are running a
program that monitors their PC activities. Trust between you and your
staff could be crushed.
Currie suggests employers give their employees Qlockwork and ask them
to run it to see how they are spending their time. Currie says there is
a difference between coming to employees with a time-management tool
and monitoring them secretly. Giving employees a tool that they can
voluntarily employ to use their time more efficiently is different from
monitoring them because you believe they're dishonest about how they
use their time.
Currie says an employer could ask employees to submit daily Activities
Reports. For an advisory firm that is already asking employees to
submit their tasks on a daily or weekly basis, the transition is far
less difficult because employees are already in the habit of filing
these reports by manually creating them. Qlockwork actually makes the
task easier by automating creation of the report.
A Web Of Distractions
"Workers these days are not using their time effectively because the PC
has now been so filled up by distractions," says Currie. "The
difference between your PC and TV is becoming more blurred every day.
If you put a TV behind a PC monitor people will be distracted, and that
is essentially what is now happening."
Look at YouTube. For my 13-year-old son, that site has replaced TV-watching time. He checks youtube.com at least once a day now. The popular site, which was bought by Google last year for $1.65 billion in stock, streams videos of everything from previews of network TV shows to rock singers getting out of their limos, and from teens putting their cars in cruise control while they climb on top of the roof to dance to actresses producing their own short films.
Meanwhile, in another change in the nature of the Web, the growth of Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds of streaming news, blogs and other information into your inbox is exploding. RSS pushes information to people through e-mail and is likely to change the nature of our Internet experience dramatically in the next few years by sending you a constant stream of information geared to your personal interests. How are you supposed to get any work done? Right now, RSS is mostly text feed, but that's likely to converge with TV as well over the next decade, as we all begin to live more and more like the Jetsons.
Managing E-mail
E-mail is likely you're biggest time drain, more invasive even than
your telephone. I know I'd rather answer an e-mail anytime than do real
work that I am supposed to be doing. And, with Outlook and other e-mail
programs informing you every time a new e-mail comes in, you are drawn
to check out each and every one.
Peggy Duncan, an Atlanta personal productivity expert who has written
five books about time management, including Conquering Email Overload,
suggests managing e-mail the same way you're supposed to manage your
telephone: Don't answer it. Instead, collect all your messages once or
twice a day and manage them all at once. You thus manage your time
rather than letting the ring of the telephone manage you. With e-mail,
a similar tack can be taken. Instead of looking at your e-mails as they
come in, leave time in the middle and at the end of the day to manage
e-mail.
Microsoft Outlook by default tells you whenever you receive a new
e-mail. But you can change your setting to eliminate this distraction.
To do so, go to the Tools menu in Outlook and choose Options. Then,
click on the Preferences tab. From there, choose Email Options and then
choose Advanced Email Options. Uncheck the Play A Sound box and you
will no longer hear the little Outlook chime we're all so familiar
with, and uncheck the Show An Envelope box to eliminate the pop ups
informing you each time an e-mail comes in. Finally, uncheck Display a
New Mail Desktop Alter. You've just eliminated a major distraction. For
an e-mail addict like me, that's big.
Web Waste
Another distraction: surfing the Web. It's pretty easy to click on a link in an e-mail or on a Web site that you're working and be transported to something related but unimportant. "You get sucked into looking at something on the Web that may be interesting but that will not earn you money," says Currie. And then there is time wasted surfing the Web for personal reasons.
The 2006 Web@Work employee survey conducted by Harris Interactive revealed that 65% of men who access the Internet from work admitted to accessing nonwork-related Web sites during work hours, versus 58% of women. Men admitted to spending 2.3 hours per week on nonwork-related Web sites, while women admitted to spending 1.5 hours per week on nonwork-related sites. And this is what people admit to.
If you have ten employees who are paid an average of $25 an hour,
eliminating personal Web surfing would save you $25,000 a year. It's
reasonable to assume that reducing Web surfing by employees looking at
work-related sites that will not earn your firm any money could save
you more.
If you run a Qlockwork report and see that you are spending two hours a day surfing the Web, you know you have a problem.
Advanced Features
I never come near utilizing the full power of most software programs
because I'd have to spend an hour or two reading the documentation and
learning the program, and I suspect you're probably the same. So I
cheated and, rather than read the documentation, I asked Currie about
some of the other clever ways to use the program.
In addition to displaying your activities in a calendar, Qlockwork
provides an Activities Report that lists all of your activities for any
period you specify. It generates the report as an HTML e-mail that you
can send and as an Excel spreadsheet. Your staff can thus e-mail their
activities for a day or an entire week, and it takes just seconds to
do.
If you are working on a project, you can create a report to monitor the
time it takes you to do that project. You do this by displaying an
Activity List and then hitting Control and clicking on the activities
you wish to include in that project. Qlockwork uses your selected
activities to generate a keyword list. So if you want to collect all of
the documents and work you did for John Smith, you would select
activities from a list and Qlockwork would use that to find all of the
activities you have done for John Smith. You can thus create a report
reflecting how much time you spent on each client.
Few Problems
Outlook is a huge program and since there are so many Outlook add-ons,
Qlockwork may not run smoothly for all users. Since I was testing other
new Outlook programs, for instance, I had to reinstall Qlockwork to get
it to run correctly after installing another add-on program. But since
then Qlockwork has been stable and has given me no other problems, and
it is not buggy.
Qlockwork prevents you from wasting time on your computer when you
should be making money. It's worth the $50 licensing fee, but you can
see for yourself by downloading a 30-day trial at www.qlockwork.com.
The program already succeeded in making me more focused. Examining the
Qlockwork report made me realize how much time I am spending answering
e-mails and I turned off my e-mail notifications-all the chimes and
pop-ups are gone. And guess what? I wrote this column in significantly
less time than usual!
Andrew Gluck, a longtime writer and journalist, is CEO of Advisor
Products Inc., a Westbury, N.Y., marketing company serving 1,500
advisory firms.