Make Time Tracking That Matters

The pandemic has enforced businesses to demonstrate adaptability and build work from home strategies to address employees' health concerns.

It brought deep transformations across most of industries including consultancy, digital solutions, development service, healthcare, financial service, media, entertainment, elearning and promoted the idea of time tracking for achieving a better work life balance and enabling workers and employers to feel in control of time.

Moreover, the demand for post-pandemic skillsets will be determined by essentials of remote work as well. According to Gwen Moran, among the must-haves for employees now are high digital capabilities including the competence in deploying productivity measurement tools.

HR leaders and managers will be using tools to measure productivity... But it’s also important to remember that user experience is often a priority in such tools. As they become more ubiquitous, they will also likely be more seamless and easily integrated into workflows.

Introduced by tools that provide time monitoring within unbroken workflow, time tracking experience relates to one the most important areas across any professional's digital workspace.

And by applying automatic time tracking featured with advanced options, we get at our fingertips a wide range of capabilities fetching far beyond simple calculations. In particular, they are including:

• accurate work time metrics
• options for optimization of work processes
• improvement of communication with customers
• deepened engagement within teams
• power-ups for more effective and collaborative environment.  

Let's see how to make time tracking that matters.

Make it to embrace the digital transformation

According to McKinsey report, building strategies of efficient online presence is one of the biggest lessons businesses need to learn from the pandemic.

For executives looking for lessons in the wake of COVID-19, one has emerged clearly: every company needs to become a tech company.

Time tracking with its provision of accurate time metrics across any device enables businesses to reimagine digital transformation strategies and achieve success by the application of insights from analytics.  

It is crucial given the needs for securing the time and resources to keep a competitive advantage in promoting digital transformation initiatives that will help in decision making and generating predictable revenue.

Make it to put constraints on meeting time

Time tracking can bring your agile teams to a new collaborative level by providing data on the time utilized in meetings.

Remote workers report a spike in meeting time and complain of meeting hell during the pandemic, which depletes energy and undermines creative collaboration while diminishing efforts and breaking workflow dramatically.

When we build time tracking in planning meetings, we significantly improve the odds of success in terms of creating accountability and more productive work. By bringing transparency on work time, setting healthy boundaries between home and work life employee time tracking can assist businesses in shifting to:

• holding shorter meetings
• meetings with clearly defined purpose
• reducing the frequency of meetings if there are alternatives.

For building strategies around more productive meetings, we recommend a great read here.

Make it to run time management experiments

Lack of 'time management awareness' unavoidably scatters focus, decreases personal productivity and delays achievement of goals for indefinite future.

For instance, in the mode of remote work and no commuting, people get 53 minutes more at their disposal per day but in most cases, this hour is immediately swallowed by 'busyness' rather than productivity.

Due to the pandemic, we had to enter the 'experiment zone' changing our perception of time and, thus, bringing new time management techniques to the surface. However uncomfortable changes might feel, it’s a good idea to use this time to tailor time management practices to your individual needs.

It can be a game changer in shaping a new lifestyle by creating more focused perspective. 'Toying' with various time management ideas by implementing time tracking and shaping your day in different ways can not only save time but assist in making thoughtful and effective choices.  

Make it to know your peak performance

Feeling that you are in control of your time is important not only for your business productivity but for feeling happier as well, which is confirmed by the results of the research.

When it comes to work time, time tracking automation and visualization in a single timeline helps:

• to become intentionally productive
• to develop productivity culture
• to create a balanced view  
• to shift focus from time-related output to business outcome.

Time tracking lets you be insights-led and understand your personal productivity patterns to feel more agile and respond to fast-paced changes at scale.

It will capture the overview of your performance and deliver insights directly from your daily work timeline containing full info of peak performance time, length of time for various tasks, your preference in task grouping. It will not only show how responsive vs. reactive you are in your work but help create more optimized workflow and validate demand for time estimates.  

Make it to protect mental health

According to findings, 39% of workers reported stretching their working day beyond business hours, which was causing stress associated with work life imbalance.

Another reason for experiencing anxiety was  the penetration of technology into daily life, which was also making a negative impact on the mental health long before the pandemic. But under the lockdown the boundaries between work and life became dangerously blurred.

Including the time tracker into the list of remote work tools proves to be a wise move for managing daily tasks and setting work priorities without affecting your life. Aside from addressing the problem of work life balance effectively, tracking work time can prevent a negative impact of the time confetti effect and help in training resilience crucial in caring for mental health.

Overall, implementation of time tracking practices within your business activities will address the negative influences of technology like:  

• excessive screen time
• multitasking
• ignoring plans and priorities
• disrupted sleep routine.

Otherwise, we diminish chances of our making productive use of time and 'kill' our ability to get uncomfortably focused, which is often the only condition for guaranteed achievement of tangible results.

Make it to turbocharge business growth

Our current reality is undergoing constant changes, and our first-hand goal is to evolve and remain agile in the face of uncertainty.

Harnessing the powers of digital time tracking creates foundations for upscaling the business while maintaining your teams agile through bringing reliability and security across multiple business operations and deepening engagement of workers with performed tasks.

In academic speak, there is proof that time perception differs depending on our level of engagement in activity:

If we’re fully engaged in an activity or pursuit, multitasking or focused on achieving a goal, then time can seem to fly by. On the other hand, when we’re bored or our mind isn’t occupied we’re less distracted. We end up “clock-watching”, unable to believe how slowly the time is creeping past.

Decreasing the stress of the daily grind can not only boost employees' engagement but but also feed back into your business growth. Taking control of your time helps get a competitive advantage, nurture and enhance collaborative environment, focus on future and scale according to business aspirations.