For the most part, the event planning and hospitality industry does not bill by the minute, although that is beginning to change. Companies with an eye on their bottom line are moving from being service based to business based, and are beginning to track time (and related expenses such as telephone calls, photocopying, etc.) spent on individual projects so that they can bill them back to the appropriate customer. Companies are finding that charging a flat management fee or a percentage of total costs does not always cover the time spent managing a sale, especially if the client begins to request that numerous changes be made and or new options explored. Employees are being asked to monitor their minutes and to submit daily reports on how their time was spent so that applicable charges can be assigned to clients. This also enables company owners to access, with greater accuracy, the cost to their company of doing a specific piece of business. Knowing how much time is assigned to individual clients allows them to determine whether or not they should continue to do business with particular clients or if they need to adjust their fees in any areas. For example, one company found that a particular client would, once contracted, want cost comparisons done of different options available to him. This would entail new costings being researched, requested from suppliers and venues, developed and proposed so that the client could weigh his impulse wishes at his leisure. There was no effort required on his part and no costs being charged back (at the time), and he gave little thought as to how much extra work his requests entailed the planning staff to undertake or the time and financial drain on the planning company’s resources. The line was drawn when it became known that 19 separate comparison costings had been requested by the client on one piece of sold business. The event planning company’s owner knew that he needed to begin to structure the company’s management fee differently to accommodate this. A change was made so that the customer could still request additional cost comparisons, but additional charges would now apply so that the time spent redoing what had been previously sold and contracted was accounted for, with the burden of fiscal responsibility for time being spent placed back on the client, not on the planning company and its employees.

Until time was tracked, the company in the above example had no idea how much time was being spent on one client and how it was adversely affecting its business. Staff could not move forward on new projects when they were still stuck trying to service what had been supposedly sold. They were unable to move into the operations phase of the program and this could easily produce a damaging domino effect not only on incoming work but on making sure what was already contracted could be delivered if planners could not adhere to supplier commitment deadlines.

You can’t address or bring change to what is taking place in your day until you first identify and track your work minutes, hours, days and weeks. Once you have identified what you do in a day, you will be able to discover, as will be discussed in later chapters, where you are making the best use of your time, and be able to pinpoint and eliminate mindless time wasters and ineffectual use of your time. On average, this initial undertaking will take between 30 to 60 minutes each day, yet will potentially save you hours each day once completed, leave you feeling good about what you accomplish each day and make working overtime a thing of the past. The catch is that it will take you longer to record your minutes if you do not track them as you go through your day. If you have to stop and relive your time, minute by minute, at the end of the day, you will end up making this a longer exercise and could easily miss some important time aspects. The trick is to capture your minutes as you move through your workday. When you come to analyzing and evaluating your results, this could take approximately three to four hours and will require your full concentration. It is best to set aside an evening or time over the weekend—away from the office in a quiet location where you will not have interruptions—to work on appraising your results.

Begin this exercise by choosing a week when you can commit to tracking your day minute by minute, from the moment you walk in the front door to the moment you walk out the door at the end of the day, and into the evening if you are working from home or attending a related business event, e.g., supplier presentation, association meeting, trade show or business conference, continuing education classes, etc. As you begin to work on your timeline remember to include your daily routine in it. This may include being first to arrive in the office and taking responsibility for making the first pot of coffee, spending time greeting arriving coworkers and partaking in watercooler chitchat and casual banter. When you tally the time, you may be surprised by how many minutes are actually being spent between arrival at the office and being able to settle down and get into the work at hand.

Tracking your work habits, as well as your time, will provide the means to allow you to address—with full understanding—how you are spending your time. For some, watercooler catch-up plays an important part of their day and is a time when they engage in bouncing creative ideas off their peers or solicit advice for a logistical dilemma. For others, watercooler chitchat could be a time distraction where they find themself unwillingly caught up in a coworker’s personal drama.

In addition to being mindful of your time for a week, it will also be important to observe and write down how much time was spent caught up in personal rather than professional chatter while performing certain tasks. It can be easy to be pulled off topic through no fault of your own during meetings with colleagues, suppliers and clients, and before you know it more time than has been allotted has passed by. Losing track of time serves to create added stress in the work arena by making it necessary to try to play catch up the rest of the day and can often delay leaving on time.

You’ll want to calculate your time spent at work each day in your targeted time week as though each minute is a billable minute you will be assigning a cost to at the end of the day. You should be able to account for your entire day—what you were doing and how much time it took—so that you will have an overview of how you spend a typical workday. Remember to include any time spent on non-work-related items, as well as time spent on personal endeavors, e.g., doctor’s appointments, surfing and shopping on the net, answering personal e-mails, etc., which can sometimes cross over into the workday and contribute to timing issues.

The only person who is going to see the results of this exercise is you. There is no judge and jury to criticize (or praise) your actions—that is not the purpose of this procedure. Being as truthful as you can will benefit you immensely by bringing change into your life and by showing you how you can have time work for you and not against you, so that you have more time in your day to enjoy professional and personal pursuits.

Uncovering how you are spending your time will move you through four main steps:

Tracking your time for a week is not meant to replace your current to-do list, but rather to merely record your daily actions for the allocated time. If you are in the habit of setting a daily agenda, continue to do so. During the week you have scheduled to track your time, take a copy of your list or daytimer so that you can do a comparison later on between what you expected to accomplish and what actually transpired. This will provide you with added insight.