24 hours a day is always not enough to do everything you want and spend the time with the ones you love. Today, Susan Serra, who runs a family design business, shares a great tip on efficient time planning, so that not even 5 minutes will be wasted!

Customer’s background

Susan Serra runs three brands and a blog at the same time, full of charming decoration ideas, dedicated to kitchen design and Scandinavian accessories for the home. This is a family business that she runs with her daughter.

Susan Serra’s best practice

Work and family responsibilities are always tricky to combine, but Susan uses a great approach to enhance her and her daughter’s productivity.

Whenever Susan logs a new task in Wrike project management software, she instantly tags it with the approximate duration. This greatly helps to efficiently organize the time and make most of each minute throughout the day.

This approach is especially helpful when you have to juggle multiple activities during the day. This is exactly the case of Susan’s daughter, who has recently given birth to a son and is struggling to nurse the baby and keep working at the same time. For instance, whenever she has a short break between baby feeding and an important call, she opens the “15 minute” folder and picks one of the tasks she can accomplish right away.

When you know exactly how long each task takes, it’s also easier to plan your work day each morning. For instance, when there are several large tasks due tomorrow, Susan starts with them to make sure she has enough time to finish them, before switching to smaller ones.  This practice ensures that you have time to concentrate on one task without distractions and thus makes you much more productive.

Do you want to learn more about the challenges of running a family business? Watch our podcast with Susan Serra:

More great tips from our customers coming soon!


"With four brands to manage, endless details and always being short on time, I need speed, ease, precision and flexibility in my chosen system. I definitely have that with Wrike.”

Susan Serra, President at Susan Serra Associates, Inc.