Tanya Sale on time management

After catching up on her emails, Ms Sale gets the kids up.

“At 6:30am, I wake the children, and then every morning I make fresh juice for the family. I think it’s so important to eat and drink right. That’s a biggie for me – making sure my family stays healthy,” she says.

Family and a good work-life balance are obviously very important to Ms Sale, and she does her best to set time aside every night to see her two teenage children.

“I try to leave work at about 6:30pm so I can be home by around 7:10pm. I always try to make it home for dinner with the family because for me, that’s very important,” she says.

After dinner, when the kids are doing their homework, Ms Sale takes the time to get to the gym before getting back to her work once more.

“I stay up for another half an hour or an hour doing abit more work and then that is it – until 6am the next morning at least,” she says.

During business hours, much of Ms Sale’s time is consumed by meetings with members, writers and lending managers, as well as devising ways in which Outsource can better serve its clients.

As CEO of one of Australia’s most promising aggregators – Outsource was a finalist in the recent Australian Broking Awards 2013 for Boutique Aggregator of the Year – Ms Sale is often required to travel for meetings.

While many professionals may enjoy a night or two away, Ms Sale says she will always do her absolute best to make sure she is back home every night.

“I like to come home,” she says.

“I don’t care if I get home at 10:30pm or 11pm, I still like to walk in the door that night so that when the kids wake up the next morning, I’m there,” she says.

Time management is important to Ms Sale because like many successful professionals, she doesn’t seem to have enough hours in her day.

“I will have back-to-back meetings; I usually have about six or seven meetings in one day, just to manage my time so I can make it home,” she explains.

“Every meeting I have has to be a productive meeting. There’s not a time when I would have a meeting just to sit down and catch up over a cuppa. We are of the mindset at Outsource that when you have a meeting with one of our members or writers or lending managers, the meeting has to be productive.”

While technology is helping Ms Sale to stay connected with clients and members, she sometimes laments the fact she is always contactable.

“Because of technology, work doesn’t stop,” she says, “as long as I have my phone on.”

By her own admission, Ms Sale has been known to turn her phone off or put it on silent during family dinner time.

The rest of the time, however, she is fully contactable, which is why she was able to have a six-week vacation in Europe and the United States.

Ms Sale says her iPad allowed her to be away from the office for “so long”.

“You can work anywhere in the world these days, and that’s what I did,” she says.

“Some of our members didn’t even realise I was away, and I was even Skyping my business partner so we could still have our regular meetings.”