Gazette guinea pigs strike again - this time road-testing time-management software. Rupert White reports


A couple of months ago, a start-up company bugged the Gazette about a software/online product called TIYGA (Time Is Your Greatest Asset).



We thought, and still think, that likely users of a software product that allows them to track the time they spend doing things through the day, would range from lawyers working on fixed-fee work to those looking to get more out of their unproductive non-personal time, or those tracking personal development.



So we sent an Orange SPV M700 to solicitor Christopher Livingston, one of 13 partners at Essex firm Holmes & Hills, loaded with TIYGA Lite, an online-only version of the system.



TIYGA is, according to company head Katrina Delargy, best used in conjunction with a desktop component forming a product called TIYGA Pro, but Mr Livingston dutifully tried out the online-only version, as no one wanted to anger his IT people and we felt that tracking time spent out of the office would be the most useful test.



The way TIYGA works is to ?present the user with a variety of time-use categories, such as 'commuting' or 'working with client X', overlaid on a kind of day-diary format [see image 1]. Going about one's daily business, one enters what one is doing by filling in the blocks of time in the relevant activity's grid line. Over time, a kind of database of time spent on various activities is collected, which can then be reported on in a variety of graphical ways.



For example, were one to set up a range of activities including billable client work, non-billable work, personal activities, commuting, personal development (reading the Gazette, naturally) and suchlike, one could then further subdivide those categories at will to reflect the level of analysis required of one's life. This could achieve clever tracking of time for personal management purposes, but if a lawyer is working on, say, fixed-fee work, it may be possible using something like TIYGA to work out where time is wasted on work, and where otherwise seemingly unproductive time is or can be used, such as when commuting or when waiting around at court. It may well be that time is used on other work-related activities that goes unnoticed, changing the relationship between time taken for fees earned.



Fundamentally, this mix of personal time-and-motion study and what other business sectors calls 'management information' could prove very useful in legal, which is rapidly becoming a much more competitive environment. Exactly how it might be used, or how useful it might be (if at all) we have no idea. But Mr Livingston was far from dismissive of TIYGA's potential: 'TIYGA Lite lets you monitor your time swiftly and easily. To get the best out of the software, you really should be brave and include non-fee-earning categories so you can properly analyse how your time has been spent during the working day. It is only from this that you can really analyse where your time is being wasted. Once the categories have been set up, it really is a simple process to record your daily activities.



'Over a period of time, a graphical representation of your activities becomes available on the TIYGA website. This helps you, among ?other things, to identify the cause of wasted time, benchmark time usage and see how productivity could be improved. As I was using a mobile device, it enabled me to keep an accurate track of the time that I spent away from the office, such as at court or meetings.'



The version of Lite we and Mr Livingston used, however, is not an iteration either of us would recommend.



'I used TIYGA Lite for three weeks and did find it useful as a tool to analyse my time, but wouldn't really recommend it,' admitted Mr Livingston. However, this is because it cannot mesh with his or any other lawyer's existing time-recording. What Mr Livingston could do was produce graphic reports of how he spent what time he could record [see image 2]. If reports from both sides could be linked, a true picture of activities could be achieved. The Gazette found TIYGA Lite frustrating for completely different, mainly user-interface reasons.



Right now, according to Ms Delargy, TIYGA is being updated to include multiple fixes and a lot more user capability on the mobile device, including being able to set up categories and sub-categories of activity on one's mobile device [see image 3]. Future development is aimed at linking more cleverly with the lives of lawyers, as well as those of other professionals such as accountants or even PR people, perish the thought.



Just last week, the Gazette saw examples of what the new TIYGA Pro should look like, and a lot of work has been done, though it still looks a bit 'Windows 98'.



It now offers two-way export links to Outlook, so future entries in TIYGA appear as diary entries in Outlook and diary entries in Outlook become time recorded in TIYGA, which we thought was neat. 'Button' distribution on the screen will also be radically changed, which is the main reason we disliked the previous, quite user-unfriendly version.



We understand the TIYGA team is also talking to an established practice management vendor, which, if it works out, will be very interesting to watch. It is possible to download a free trial of TIYGA Pro for desktop now, but we suggest waiting until a time-limited full-function demo version of Mobile Pro can be downloaded to see if tracking your time is worth doing. That way you will have lost nothing but, well, time.



- Go to www.tiyga.com