This week I realized that a hospital and my consulting practice suffer from the same operational problem: the same information gets entered repeatedly into different systems.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Hospitals pay for it in delays and frustration. Consultants pay for it in lost billable time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In both cases, the root cause is the same: information gets lost as it moves between people, departments, and software.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For a relative of mine, it started with abdominal pain, not much but still quite annoying, at least at first. Over several days, it became severe, to the point where it was all consuming, causing nauseousness and worse. My relative finally had enough, and asked me to take him to urgent care. This urgent care is part of the same health system as his general practitioner (GP). In the examining room, a nurse asked for his insurance, GP’s name, whether he’d had any labs recently. The nurse recorded it all, then asked about his symptoms and worked through possible diagnoses. The decision: go to the emergency room. Urgent care even called ahead so the ER admission would go faster.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The ER was in that same health system too. GP, urgent care, ER, all in the same healthcare system, with the same network, the same records, supposedly available to everyone in it. When we arrived, we were asked the exact same set of questions again. Insurance. GP. Recent labs. Symptoms. All of it re-entered, by hand. And the patient was still in pain the entire time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That’s three times for the basic information and twice for the details of what was actually wrong. None of it carried over between departments, all on the same network, presumably in the same system. The information didn’t move with the patient: it was lost. And it cost time, both the patient’s and the medical staff’s, at a moment when time mattered.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As I was sitting in the waiting room in the ER, I came to a realization: this is exactly what commonly happened in my consulting practice. This was true when I was consulting as an employee of an S&P 500 company, and true as a solo consultant. Let me explain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As a consultant, I build a deliverable \u2014 say, a PowerPoint \u2014 and it ends up living in an email, then in Dropbox, then somewhere on my laptop. Three places, the same file, none of them the definitive one. Why not? Because any one of them could have been modified. Usually (but not always) the last one is the definitive one. But with these living all over the place, which one is that?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
My time tracking process was even worse. I would jot notes in a notebook, re-enter them into Excel to total the hours, and then re-enter the same information into an invoice for the client.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The same project data existed in three different places. Every transfer introduced opportunities for mistakes, forgotten billable work, and wasted administrative effort.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is surprisingly common among independent consultants and small consulting firms. Time tracking, project management, client notes, invoices, and payments often live in separate systems that don’t communicate with one another.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But there is one meaningful difference: at the hospital, each new round of questions could surface a nuance, a detail that hadn’t been mentioned the first time, a symptom that was forgotten. There’s at least a benefit, even if the process is inefficient and annoying. In my consulting practice, there’s no such upside. (Unless you really enjoy data entry.) It’s the identical information, typed in again, for no benefit at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Looking back, I realized I wasn’t losing time because consulting work was difficult. I was losing time because information kept falling out of context.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Every time I switched from notes to spreadsheets, from spreadsheets to invoices, or from invoices to accounting software, I paid what I now think of as a Context Tax<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Individually, each step took only a few minutes. Collectively, they consumed hours every month that could have been spent serving clients or growing the business.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I don’t know of any consultant who likes this process. And none of us should have to put up with it, either as patients or as business owners.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As consultants ourselves, we eventually stopped asking how to make the process slightly better and started asking why the same information needed to be entered multiple times at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That’s why we built TimeCatchApp.<\/p>\n\n\n\n TimeCatchApp is designed around a simple principle: information should be captured once and remain connected throughout the consulting workflow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Instead of retyping information into multiple systems, consultants can focus on delivering value to clients. We would never go back to the old way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If your consulting practice relies on notebooks, spreadsheets, disconnected documents, and manual invoices, you’re probably paying a Context Tax every week without realizing it. TimeCatchApp was built to eliminate that tax by keeping project information, client notes, time tracking, invoicing, and payments connected from the start.<\/p>\n\n\n\nHow Connected Consultant Time Tracking Solves This<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Frequently Asked Questions<\/h2>\n\n\n\n