Alana Flick: interior architect

Hey Alana! tell us a bit about what you do.

I’m an interior architect based in Hamburg, Germany specializing in Hospitality Design. I’m an expert at creating guest experiences and love designing liveable and lovable spaces. Even though I’m freelance, my work brings me into contact with a ton of other specialists – from architecture and manufacturing, through to construction, project management and investment.

Why did you decide to track your time?

I’ve actually been tracking time for a while – it’s indispensable when you work with so many different clients and consultants. I track time to help improve my efficiency and bill honestly for all my work. I’ve always tried to be very precise with time tracking, but I only recently realized just how many small details slip through my fingers, like travel and client phone calls.

What made you choose Timely?

The automatic time tracking function “Memory” is awesome! It’s great to have a technology that can save everything you do in a day and let you choose when you want to fill out your timesheet. It lets me bill as accurately as possible and work naturally without interruption – I can just focus entirely on my work!

Do you use Timely for anything other than billing accurately?

Yep! I also use it to track unbillable hours spent on marketing, client and supplier relationship management, essential admin and accounting. As a “solopreneur” it's great to get an overview of your actual activities and since I am my own manager, it’s also a useful way to increase my productivity and efficiency. I find Timely’s tags particularly useful for dividing projects into different phases – I can see exactly how much time I actually spend on each and improve my estimates for future client proposals.

How does Timely add up from a design perspective?

Great! I adore sleek user-friendly designs in software and with Timely it’s really easy to quickly assign tasks to different projects and clients. It’s pretty intuitive, so you don’t waste time just trying to get to grips with the app.

Do you mind showing your time management process in Timely?

Sure! These are the main tags I use to organize time in Timely:

And here's a typical week in the life of an interior architect:

I start my week with calendar blocking, scheduling and reserving blocks of time ahead for upcoming tasks. Since Timely is connected to my calendar, all my pre-scheduled blocks show up automatically inside the app to serve as a guide for my work.

But of course life happens and people call me, or I decide to work longer on a project because I’m in the flow, or a conference call takes longer than planned… No problem – since Timely tracks everything for me in background, I can just look up what I actually worked on and log my time precisely. The Memory Tracker really makes the whole time tracking experience very care-free: you can concentrate more on your work and – as cheesy as it sounds – you can actually forget time and stay in your flow.