Want More Time: 10 Reasons To Start Time Tracking Now

Navigating through the last leg of 2020 with extra caution, we still can praise ourselves for moving forward despite disruptions that pandemic brought to our daily work lives.

To stay on the course of optimism and awareness, we further explore the reasons behind time tracking for improving life quality, increasing resilience and getting more time for achievement of work life balance.

Overall, time tracking turns to be of paramount importance when it comes to addressing issues of procrastination, planning, prioritizing, maintaining motivation and meeting deadlines stress-free.

Staying nimble in a fast-paced work environment requires time management skills perfectly polished with time tracking practices, especially with the steady dynamics of remote work market increase.

Time tracking enables you to fine-tune your time management strategies to realize not only your business goals but achieve your wellness milestones. Below, we list areas for improvements, which can be tackled with implementation of time tracking practices.

Healthy boundaries

Time tracking for setting boundaries proudly tops the list of time saving tips due to the status of a proven and tested solution for almost all the challenges associated with the shift to WFH.

It seems that with the death of 9 to 5 office-show-up-culture, we got all the benefits of managing our time sas we please. In actuality, it appeared to be far from truth. Instead of a well-structured day, we often get overloaded, digitally and physically, and find it hard to 'terminate' work.

Blurring the boundaries can go as far as changing the behaviors and habits dramatically. In particular, with the shift to remote work people demonstrate less likelihood of taking sick days that might result in neglecting basic wellbeing needs, as suggested in stories supported with illustrative stats.

How time tracking brings more time? Not to pay too high price for workforce agility, there are time tracking tools that help get back control over your time and draw healthy boundaries effortlessly. Indeed, with a time tracker, you get a simple, yet efficient solution for setting the healthy boundaries on your work time.

Availability of time calculations across any device and platform implies storing work time information automatically. Thus, it paves the way to removing the load of manual calculations, eliminating the risks of guess games on the utilized time and decreasing dangers of burnout .

Fair charge

When it comes to providing clarity in finance, there is no compromise. Demonstrating accountability through transparency in allocation and utilization of time will help you win over any client and, most importantly, gain trust.

Time tracking does not just deliver numbers, it is a perfectly designed tool for persuasion and motivation that assists in establishing collaborative relations and setting billable rates showcasing you expertise accordingly.

How time tracking brings more time? Tracking the progress of your projects in terms of time spending helps you make money mindfully, without overstretching yourself or sacrificing your personal time.

Adequate time estimates help you visualize the desired outcomes more clearly and set the rates for your service at best.

Productive peaks

Contrary to deep set beliefs, motivation does not equal an exceptional willpower. All it requires is resonating with the purpose of work and filling time with the meaning.

Time tracking comes as a helpful instrument in creating that alignment and achieving a high level of productivity through cultivating healthy habits including the ones that promote more meaningful work. Though it is believed that our most productive hours come between 8 am and 2 pm, the peak performance can greatly differ depending on personal preferences, rhythms and habits.

Timelines registering activity within time tracking can provide valuable insights into individual's personal productivity peaks, dig deeper into work related system and re-establish high productivity models .

How time tracking brings more time? Using the information related to time tracking, it is easier to prioritize the tasks and allocate time for performing the most challenging tasks at time slots of 'personally ensured' productivity coming at the time of productivity peaks.

Optimized admin routine

It comes as no surprise that time tracking helps you keep focus on the task at hand, but time tracking apps with advanced functionality can do so much more than a simple time blocking. With a multitude of options out on the market, users can opt for time tracking that delivers optimization of administrative work at a new level.

Apart from eliminating the costs of timesheets, time tracking addresses the wide spectrum of issues of work routine that can speed up with digitization. In particular, a full-fledged time tracker contributes to optimization of working with email, creating invoices, requesting and approving PTO, editing tasks without the necessity to switch between tabs, etc.

According to McKinsey Report , pandemic pushed businesses to adopt to full-time digital presence by implementing new tools and incorporating new practices (including automatic time tracking) into work:

Companies digitized many activities 20 to 25 times faster during COVID-19.

How time tracking brings more time? Time tracking is a building block of healthy work routine as it is the only means of creating the clear picture of work time utilization regardless of task performer's location.

Besides, under the terms imposed on businesses by quarantines, time tracking responds to the requirements of employees' safety and security without any downsize risk.

Team management

With global shift to digital economy and expansion of remote work market, changes in the list of our everyday work tools are massive, to say the least. Almost all the teams are virtual ready.

A digital time tracker with its power of automation successfully prevents reduced collaboration by enabling smooth workflows in multiple modes of team communication.

Apparently, it is not sufficient to measure productivity by the simple count of hours worked. Therefore, team managers mostly welcome the idea of team time tracking as it opens the opportunity to do more with data and 'graduate' far beyond a basic skill of meeting a project deadline.

Imprecision is not just inconvenient but detrimental for working processes when you want to keep the whole team on a radar and never miss a point. For one thing, time tracking can free teams from inefficient processes and at the same time, highlight areas that can be further optimized by leveraging technologies.

How time tracking brings more time? Given the power of time tracking automation potential, time metrics accuracy serves as an igniting force for driving results and increasing the speed of project performance.

Time tracking assists managers in instant evaluation of the team members' performance, contributes to equal workload distribution and helps forecast most outcomes with precision as well.

Elimination of procrastination

Procrastination is one of the biggest productivity (and time) killers. To address it properly, it is essential not to label it as laziness or see it as a nuance that must be overcome with activating some personal superpowers.

Fighting the unproductive mode and procrastination is about time investments but in terms of quality rather than quantity so it is important to 'relocate' your focus from 'oh-how-much-I-waste' to 'what-one-thing-I-can-do'.

How time tracking brings more time? Productivity starts with creating room for accomplishment. To get a feeling of achievement, procrastinators can try taking simple steps alongside application of time tracking that ensures delivery of accurate, complete and consistent data to support your action plan:

break a task into smaller sub-tasks
refuse the idea of flawless performance
perform to the end without fixating on the outcome
capture the moment of accomplishment in terms of how you feel
repeat the cycle with a next task.

Enhanced productivity

Implementing time tracking practices into your work is an unobtrusive way of managing it with efficiency and removing 'busyness' off the daily agenda. It results in adequate work distribution within project performance and exploring personal and business productivity at a new level of experience.

How time tracking brings more time? Time tracking seeks to identify energy-consuming low value tasks and rebuild the system by setting grounds for the model that is sustainable and just due to a built-in mechanism of effectiveness:

for an individual, it is creating a clearly visible work timeline with multiple options of optimizing the routine
for a team, it eliminates the hassle of uneven work distribution and broken workflow
for project managers, it enables project performers to get a dragonfly-eye view of the project whether it is a large scale project or not, at all the stages starting from planning to completing with retrospective.

Remote collaboration

If you were on the fence about time tracking before, with remote becoming a dominant factor globally, it is time to reconsider. The unique element of time tracking is ensuring the easy transition to all-digital experience that opens vast opportunities of remote collaboration within teams of any size.

Recently, we've seen that we can accomplish big scale projects remotely without compromising on productivity or quality, and time tracking proves to be a sure way of enhancing team productivity and bringing deeper collaboration. But mismanaged remote work extends the work day and eliminates work life boundaries that makes a negative impact on mental wellbeing.

How time tracking brings more time? Time tracking practices bring attention to best suited work models which can streamline processes and remove the stress of remote work overload.

Maintenance of balance

We mentioned above that time tracking helps build stronger boundaries on work time, which brings us to the point of discussing a broader picture: time tracking experience can seriously improve work life balance by providing precise time metrics on work related activities and beyond.

Carrie McKeegan stated it brilliantly in her article we recommend as a great read on understanding the core of personal and business productivity:

Time tracking is the path toward work-life balance, not away from it.

How you get more time with time tracking:

you spend less time calculating and more time earning
you can maintain 'focused vision' in work due to increase of awareness of time allocation, which helps accomplish tasks faster and with better results.
you define areas of importance both in professional and personal life for building more calculated strategies.

Schedule with flexibility

Flexibility in planning a workday is one of the greatest perks candidates search for when browsing the vacancies, according to multiple sources feeding HR statistics. Specifically, as stated in Glassdoor Employment Confidence Survey, 30% of candidates value flexible hours over pay raises.

Employees welcome the idea of flexible options implying work off-site full time for achieving a better work life balance. The scenario of planning with flexibility became possible due to availability of tech solutions providing unbroken workflows for dispersed workplaces, which are seamlessly managed with automatic time tracking.

How time tracking brings more time? The options delivered by automatic time tracking incorporate flexible work scheduling and help create digital distraction-free work environment. A flexible model alongside time tracking fosters performance of tasks in 'chunks', which is an effective method for avoiding time waste, keeping the mind focused and communications clear and more effective.

To conclude

Through thoughtful time tracking, time management can perfectly blend in any business model across multiple professional groups. It brings more awareness and more free time. In particular, you:

get the data on how much time you utilize for work
see when you have your productive peaks
get a clear understanding of what productivity pattern you follow best (by productivity pattern we mean how you prefer to perform the tasks if you have a freedom of choice, from the top priority tasks or from routine ones to 'warm up' when starting the day).

Knowledge of advanced time tracking metrics can be the cornerstone in creating time management strategy tailored to your personal and business needs at best.