Time tracking is an important task and I understood the value of effective time tracking when I joined my current organization. Previously, when I used to work in a different organization, they used to run the mill based working strategy on campus hours. Work was more process-oriented instead of result-oriented. It was a fixed job with a fixed amount of work and mostly required me to come in, get my duties fulfilled and go back home.
However, when I moved to my current organization, I realized the true power of time-tracking and how it can have a life-changing impact on your personality. The current organization where I work is more of a consultancy firm/digital agency and here we spend most of our times entertaining clients on call. Providing consultancy requires an adequate amount of concentration and we usually charge clients by the hour. If I wouldn’t have found myself in a fix, there was a high chance I could’ve ever realized that time tracking is this much essential.
If you want to perform outstandingly at your job, you need to be able to perform effective time-tracking. You not only gain a proficient edge among others at getting your tasks done in due time, but you also create significant transparency between yourself and your management by allowing them to study your working patterns.
Personally here, we use our own product for effective time management and it is none other than TaskQue. It has all the features that help us organize our time in the perfect manner. What’s more? It allows us to set particular deadlines so we can learn how productive we have been in meeting them.
Are you wondering how effective time tracking can help you improve your business performance?
Let’s find out.
It’s One Way to Kick-Start Your Efficiency Cycle
Most calls that we receive from our clients and customers already know that their businesses are profitable. So, when we talk about profitability that’s not the important cause behind why they seek consultancy from us. Their purpose is to learn how they can become more profitable in the long run. The answer to becoming more profitable for every other entrepreneur is one and only, “Get Efficient”.
Assume that you’re running a website where the audience keeps coming to read what you publish. You write your blog posts and when you are writing them, you start time-tracking with the help of a software.
There is a saying that if your tasks are easier to accomplish, you are not working hard enough and you ultimately need to improve them. Maybe, it is time you work on that edge!
If it takes you four hours to complete a single blog post from start to finish and you’re casually doing it; a time-tracking software can help you analyze that time and help you improvise it for the better.
Besides, we all conduct meetings on a weekly basis and often in the heat of discussion, we totally forget how much time we have spent in conducting hour-long meetings with each other. Do we even realize that it shaves off a good amount of productive hours from our clock?
However, if only our minutes of a meeting is scheduled in a software, we can try to wrap things up a whole lot earlier. An effective time-management application can help us achieve it in no time.
Time-Tracking Can Remove Productivity Obstacles
Effective time tracking can also help us identify all obstacles that are becoming a source of hindrance in our productivity. These obstacles can be anything; from complicatedly long processes to never-ending futile meetings (as discussed above).
Are you spending more time at the water station discussing office politics? Maybe, you spend a bit of an extra time at lunch! Or maybe, you like to check your social profiles quite many times in a day. Whatever, the case is at your end, if you are able to identify where most of your unbilled hours are being invested, you can simply sieve your precious time out of the biggest drains and upgrade your productivity.
Distractions can come in all shapes and sizes. But, what can work best for your particular need? An effective time-tracking software that can easily help you identify those distractions. Wait a minute… Are we talking about a robot with analysis capabilities to scan our surroundings or are we talking about a time-tracking software? Duh! We are talking about the software only.
Here’s how! When you will organize your time with a tracking software, it will show you that you still have some extra time left on your clock which you can turn productive for your personal benefit. Amazingly, you will realize that extra time spent at the water stations or at the canteen are nothing more but distractions.
They will emerge into your routines like gap holes giving you a chance altogether to put you in a better position so you can strategize change for the betterment.
If You Don’t Track Time, You Can’t Set Goals
Are you eager to make some real changes in your business performance? In order to do that, you need to set up some measurable goals. An effective time-management software will not only help you boost your efficiency, but it will also help you organize measurable ROIs.
Here’s how it can do it! Last month, you worked hard and achieved your targets… an effective time management software showed you how much time you saved on your clock. You can adjust it in your schedule accordingly.
If your end goal was all about delivering projects on time, it has now changed to achieving more to deliver more and better than before all because you realized that you have some extra hours on your clock.
Ask yourself! Why do you aim to put so much effort into your organization? If it is not to secure your position and cement your reputation for the long haul. You want to see yourself succeed and move forward and the only way of doing so is to give your best at whatever you do. With an effective time management software, you can organize your routine, shave some extra hours, be quick and effective and do a whole lot more.
Irrespective of the type of organization you work for, it is highly essential that you do your part in making your company, a profitable solution. With effective time tracking, you can easily do it by being more productive and result-oriented.
What You Need to Know About the Best Time Tracking Software
If you want to achieve the perfect balance in time management, then a simple time-tracking software isn’t the ultimate solution for you anymore. We have entered into the era of digital a more adept technological world where more robust and flexible management tools have emerged. In fact, some of these technologies are bundled together with remarkable time tracking feature in order to help us easily multi-task our way to success.
So, before you delve into the wonders of what is the best possible time-tracking solution for you, make sure that it offers you something more than just time management.
Here’s what you need to look for in the software application:
- Check whether it offers you a freemium version of the app
- Check if it offers you at least one free integration to multi-task
- Check if it includes all the basic functionalities of project management
- Check if the vendors of the app include a mobile app solution
Timely
If you are looking for an innovative time tracking software app solution which has something more to offer then just some simple time-tracking, then you are looking at Timely as your ultimate resort. This particular app is good at organizing your schedules so you can work more efficiently. It organizes your tasks in advance and estimates the time it will require to complete so you don’t have to get into any later hassles. Side by side, effective time tracking will further enable you to analyze your time spent on each task which will enable you to optimize your schedule in a much better fashion in the future.
The app is a wonderful solution for iOS users. It also comes as a browser integration.
Rescue Time
Looking for an app that records everything for you so you can create logs and view it at a later time? RescueTime records every activity that you perform so you can learn what are the elements which are creating distractions in your life.
For example, if you have a bad habit to check on your social profiles every day, you can cut down that time by understanding how you can get your daily tasks done more quickly. RescueTime is an app that can help you understand which activities are ready to eliminate in order to get more productive.
In fact, RescueTime can eventually block you out from going to websites that make you procrastinate your daily tasks. Isn’t that interesting?
RescueTime is available on iOS, Windows, Linux, and Android.
Toggl
Planning to get a time-tracking software app that works well with everything? Yes, there exists one and it’s called Toggl. Here’s how Toggl is different than any other time tracking app on the market. It comes with an export feature which allows you to track your time and send it to a multitude of integration (including, but certainly not limited to Asana, Atlassian Jira, Basecamp, FreshBooks, Github, Google Docs, Open Project, Quickbooks, Salesforce, Slack, Teamwork, and Trello).
With so many integrations are you wondering how secure the Toggl infrastructure actually is? For starters, it can back up information every 24 hours to several locations to keep all your information safe.
Toggl is available on all OS and all browsers.
The Wrap Up
Effective time management is the key to improving your work performance. It constantly challenges you to work harder and faster so you create much better and productive results. For every organization, seeing the light of the day for success is not an easy job and often a time when employees are left astray, they deliver results that are not result-oriented but more process oriented. You, as an entrepreneur, don’t want that to happen with your team of experts. If they are learning at constant intervals, they are going to step in to make your business highly profitable.
Ask yourself, if it isn’t the end goal for your business after all! Get yourself an effective time management application that helps you achieve your goals efficiently and implement it with the best practices.
Really, it is a fantastic blog and I like your one point very much that is the biggest and maximum obstacles are created by our mind.