Time is a precious commodity. There’s a finite amount of it, and not all time is treated equally. We may have some blocks of time that are more productive than others. Furthermore, present time is more valuable than future time (past time is also valuable, which I’ll get to in a minute). If we have to finish a project immediately, you put a bigger weight on the time you have available now as opposed to the time you will have available later.

With that in mind, we should give time the respect it deserves. We must track and analyze what time is being allocated for what, and how wisely it’s being used.

This is where time tracking comes into play. Using a tool such as Harvest, you can record the time you’re spending on a project during or after the activity. This allows you to keep an accurate log of your time expenditures.

What’s cool about tools like Harvest is that as you accrue a lengthy log of time spent, you can look back and analyze your efficiency. Are you spending the most time on projects right before major deadlines? If so, you might be procrastinating too much. Or, are you spending way too much time on unimportant project tasks? That may highlight a need to delegate.

Analyzing your past time is a very critical activity. If you were a track runner, you’d want to keep a log of your mile times, right? Otherwise, how would you track your improvements? The same goes for project management. Identify what you may be doing wrong, aim to improve, evaluate and then repeat.

Projects with big organizations tend to involve a lot of people on the project side. Whether it’s a whole team you have to go through or just a handful of people, this can create too much drag on the project. Instead of having one or two people sign off on a mock-up, you have six different people providing six different points of view with no consensus in sight.

The best way to manage this situation is to establish a lead point of contact. Who is the chief representative from the organization? Usually, this is the person who ultimately signs off on everything. You can reduce the amount of friction in the project by going directly to them. It should then be that person’s option to seek input from their directs or peers.

You may even want to state outright from the beginning of the project that you need a primary point of contact to work with. If it’s not easily identifiable who the chief representative is, this may be the route to take.

One of the hardest parts of project management is communicating visual ideas to a client. You have a specific vision of how a web site will look and function, and the client has their vision. That’s why communicating visual ideas in the form of wireframes, mock-ups and other designs is critical.

Annotations can help you communicate these design ideas with more precision. An annotation is simply a note that explains a specific part of the design. For example, you could have an annotation explaining why the shopping cart button needs to be positioned a certain way in the header of the wireframe.

This is pretty simple. The challenging part is finding the right way to incorporate annotations into the work. I’ve recently been experimenting with an online tool called Notable that makes this a breeze. You simply upload the design or indicate a URL of a page, add your annotations, and share the link with your client.

There are two views of the annotations. One allows the client to hover their mouse over the annotated areas of the design, and the other gives a list view of all the annotations. Both are effective ways to communicate. Give it a shot!