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Who Keeps Time? Developing a Culture of Effective Time Management in Professional Practice

Overview

This is not an ordinary time-management video about diaries, task lists and personal productivity. It takes a wider view. In professional practice, people's use of time is strongly influenced by compliance requirements, client expectations, work processes, management decisions and the activities the practice measures and rewards.

At one level, time management asks whether individuals are using time effectively against the practice's established standards. At a higher level, it asks whether those standards define and encourage the right use of time in the first place. This shifts attention from individual discipline alone to the way the practice organises, allocates and evaluates professional time.

Recent industry survey findings identify SARS administration and deadline pressure among the most common challenges facing South African tax practitioners. Filing seasons, provisional tax deadlines, monthly PAYE and VAT obligations, eFiling difficulties, verifications and audits all influence what receives attention and when. These external demands cannot simply be managed away. The more useful question is whether the practice's systems, habits and priorities help its people respond effectively – or make the pressure worse.

The video therefore asks: who keeps time in a practice or professional unit? Is it the owner, a senior practitioner, the compliance calendar, the workflow system, the client or the work itself? The answer affects which work receives attention, whose time is used and what behaviour is encouraged. Workflows, timesheets, performance measures and rewards are more than administrative tools. They communicate what the practice regards as valuable work. Over time, these repeated signals and decisions create a culture of time: a shared understanding of what constitutes valuable work and a good use of professional time.

The video gives particular attention to small, owner-led practices. In these practices, the owner is often the main source of expertise, the principal client contact, the allocator of work and the final reviewer. This can create clear direction, but it can also make the owner a bottleneck.

Artificial intelligence introduces another set of choices. As AI reduces the time required for some tasks, practices must reconsider how work is divided between technology, junior staff and senior professionals. The nature and complexity of the work matter. Routine compliance work, work requiring experienced interpretation and genuinely complex matters may require different combinations of process, technology and professional judgement. These choices also affect staff learning, capability building and succession.

The video concludes with a one-page Practice Time Diagnostic. It is designed primarily for a small, owner-led practice in which the owner remains central to work allocation, review and client relationships. These assumptions are stated clearly. Practitioners from larger or more complex practices and corporate tax functions can adapt the questions to their own circumstances.

Video Content

• The South African time-management challenge: why practice time is shaped by the compliance calendar, SARS administration and workload pressures, as well as by personal discipline.
• Who keeps time – and how a culture of time takes shape: how owners, senior practitioners, clients, deadlines, workflows, timesheets, performance measures and rewards create shared expectations about valuable work and shape professional behaviour.
• Rethinking the culture of time in an owner-led practice: how owner dependence, different kinds of work, changing task times and AI affect work allocation, professional judgement, staff development and succession.
• The Practice Time Diagnostic: a practical way to examine the practice's current culture of time, identify possible misalignments and select priorities for further attention.

Competencies Developed

The video helps practitioners strengthen their ability to:

• Distinguish time-management problems arising from personal discipline from those created by external demands, work systems and practice habits.
• Identify the people, systems and external forces that govern priorities, pace and work allocation in their practice or professional unit.
• Interpret workflows, timesheets, performance measures and rewards as signals that create and reinforce the practice's culture of time.
• Evaluate the factors – including the nature and complexity of the work – that should inform decisions about allocating work between AI tools, junior staff and senior professionals, including the implications for staff development and succession.
• Use and, where necessary, adapt the Practice Time Diagnostic to identify questions and priorities for improving how professional time is organised.