Whether you’re an employee, freelancer or business owner, tracking your time improves your productivity, helps you bill accurately and streamlines operations. It also allows you to uncover time-wasting activities and improve team performance.
But forcing employees to track time can be difficult, especially if they feel like you’re spying on them. Fortunately, there are some ways you can get them to buy in.
Increased Productivity
Automatic time tracking creates an accurate digital memory of an individual’s workday by automatically logging the time they spend on specific tasks and projects. It then generates timesheet drafts in the background without manual input. Individuals only need to review and approve them for submission.
This software can also reveal unproductive habits and eliminate unnecessary distractions. This is especially important for employees who are prone to procrastination, such as those who often check email or browse social media at work. It can also help managers identify which team members are overextending themselves and allocate resources more efficiently.
Share these data with the team to encourage everyone to improve their productivity. It can also be used to set realistic goals that help each employee meet their professional aspirations. Having these metrics in mind can also prevent project overruns by allowing teams to make informed decisions about deadlines and deliverables. This allows businesses to maximize their ROI while minimizing the risk of miscalculations.
Reduced Wasted Time
One of the most common ways a project goes over budget is due to insufficient time estimation. This is especially true for teams working remotely, where it’s often difficult to know how long a task will take without having an in-person conversation.
Time tracking software eliminates the margin of error associated with manual timesheet entry, delivering a more accurate record of every hour spent on a given project. It also helps track overlooked internal work, such as project communication and coordination activities.
Additionally, automatic time tracking can help identify the pitfalls that lead to unproductive activities — like spending too much time on emails or scrolling social media. This insight allows employees to better understand their workflow patterns and make changes to their habits to improve their productivity. In short, the right tool can help prevent a lot of unnecessary wasted time and money. This means you can stop leaking cash and focus on growing your business.
Increased Billing Efficiency
For a professional services firm, especially one that pays its team members by the hour and needs to bill clients on the amount of time spent on each project, automatic time tracking is essential. It ensures that every minute of work is accounted for, and provides transparent, verifiable records to verify client invoices.
Automated time trackers also provide a snapshot of productivity levels, showing the moments that are most productive or unproductive for a team. This helps fine-tune productivity and eliminates wasted time. For example, a time tracker can show how long a team member spends compulsively checking email or scrolling social media.
In addition, these apps can automatically fill in time sheets based on app usage, visited websites and scheduled calendar events. They also allow employees to blacklist apps that don’t need to be tracked and customize which data turns into an automatic time entry. This saves the team time on manual timesheet creation.
Improved Team Performance
Whether your firm uses freelancers or employees, the best automatic time tracking software saves everyone’s valuable time. This tool allows you to see who is most efficient at the moment and takes the guesswork out of estimating how long a project will take from start to finish. With this data, managers can easily find ways to improve team performance, such as assigning important projects to the most proficient members or providing further training to underperforming ones.
Additionally, with the help of automated time tracking software, you can identify behavioral patterns such as multitasking or procrastination, helping you to fine-tune your work routine and prioritize tasks accordingly. Some software even reveals when you are most productive so you can schedule your work during those hours. This will boost efficiency and ensure you meet deadlines and budgets. For small businesses, it will also reveal whether or not certain tasks are profitable, allowing you to increase client fees if necessary.
