Case Studies

Graphic designer liberated from administrative conundrum

Meet Garth.

Garth's design shop Clear creates corporate identities and event materials, does online and print marketing, and even designs apparel. Garth has lots of hats to wear to keep his business moving in the right direction.

Why Garth uses Intervals.

Before Intervals, Garth was using a motley crew of time-keeping instruments: electronic calendars for scheduling, Adobe software to keep track of projects and their various related tasks, email for communication, and of course, the ubiquitous paper timesheets. Bottom line, he was spending way too much time feeding, updating and maintaining all these hungry electronic mouths instead of doing the thing he started a business for: design.

I need to bill clients, but when I'm doing administrative work, I'm not making money. I need to spend my time designing, not maintaining client info. Before using Intervals I would write down all the [client] time and add it up and then bill clients—and if a project did span a few months, then I would have to sort through all these pieces of paper and find out what [time] applied to whom.

The mix of administrative systems became so tangled up and so overwhelming that things started getting lost. Garth had less and less time to devote to design. He decided to take matters into his own hands and signed up for Intervals.

Gone are the electronic calendars and the reams of emails. Most glorious of all, gone are the paper timesheets. At any given time, Garth manages about 25 jobs, and with Intervals, he can keep track of them all, along with all their clients, freelancers and suppliers.

What Intervals does for Garth.

Intervals has liberated Garth from all his administrative headaches, letting him get back to the thing he does and loves best: design.

And no matter how many projects Garth's got going on at once, he no longer has to worry what timesheet went where, or where he put that little piece of paper he happened to scribble some hours on when he was just too busy to print another timesheet. Intervals enables him to manage everything, all at once, and in one place. Most of all, he no longer has to remember what hours went to what client—it's all broken out by task, by project, by client. It's the little Intervals timers that now keep his time for him, that are Garth's favorites.

The timers—that's what I love. It's easy to work the whole day and not know where your time has gone, so I know exactly how much time I have spent on different clients—getting a detailed report [of that time] is very cool to me.

Garth has a lot more control and he's gotten his time back just by using Intervals.

And the Pelago guys? "I feel like I can trust these guys and they responded positively. They are good about that."