6 reasons to start time tracking now

Time is a finite resource, the most finite of all. Is there something that we can do to improve our time management, to make sure that we spend time on the right things and optimize our life and business through better use of our time?

The answer is time tracking….

Productivity

Tracking time can help you increase productivity.

Research shows that people who track their time more frequently are better in time management. They track their work in more detail and further fine-tune their sense of productivity.

A series of experiments were conducted in 1920’s at Western Electric factory at Hawthorne, in Chicago with the purpose to determine workplace productivity, what aided and contributed to it and what hurt productivity. The result was that the best way to increase productivity has little to do with changes in the physical work environment and much more to do with being observed and engaged about productivity. This is known as the Hawthorne effect.

Elimination of time waste

Time tracking leads to the elimination of the leaked hours. Companies lose hundreds of billable hours every year due to poor time management. With time tracking you will recognize how much time you spend on non-essential activities and start spending more time on meaningful tasks and get more done and keep better track of what you are doing.

Time tracking brings on the surface activities that take too much time. By analysing whether these activities are really necessary, you can then work on optimizing them, if they are trully necessary.

Avoid multitasking

Multitasking may seem like a good way to save your time and finish for example 3 tasks in the time that it usually takes to complete one task but actually this is not the case. As our brains are not capable of achieving this when we multitask we end up with three incomplete or lower quality results tasks instead of completing one task properly.

When you track time you avoid multitasking as you have work on one task at a time, recording the duration and having better results.

Transparency & Accountability

When many parties are involved in a job and activities are multi-layered time tracking provides transparency, i.e. who did which task, when it was done, how much time it was spent on each task. This leads to multiple benefits.

Through the increased awareness of the time spent on each task and their contribution to a process or a project employees become more accountable and are provided with the necessary insight to improve their work and intentionally become more productive.

Transparency also allows managers to assess and recognize employees that are doing a good job, thus helping employee morale and also contributes to a more productive environment. This also contributes to the elimination of distrust across teams, especially in case of distributed teams and drive out the fear of employees that they may not perceived as hard working when they work remotely, as recent surveys show.

Team management

Moreover, this transparency provides the necessary tools to the continuous improvement of operations, more accurate planning of projects and efficient use of resources.

A manager can easily see if an employee or a team of employees is working over their capacity and take corrective actions before they burnout. This can be a change of a deadline, re-prioritization of projects, or justify the case for a new hire.

Also, you can see if you are consuming time more quickly than anticipated in accordance with the project budget. This gives you the chance of examining the situation, liaise with the team and take the necessary course of action to bring the project back on track.

Profitability

When customers are billed by the hour it is evident that time tracking is vital. You wound not want to either underestimate your work and make a loss or to overestimate your work and possibly damage your relationship with a client.

Even in the cases they are not billed by the hour time tracking is still necessary. In the services businesses for example, where a project or a service is provided at a particular price, essentially blocks of time are sold, irrespective of the pricing structure. Every project or service is composed of a certain amount of time which represents a cost to the company, according to the wages of the employees working on the project or providing the service.

Without time tracking many businesses do not realize that some of their projects or customers are not profitable. Also, it provides the necessary insight to decide if for example is more profitable for your business to undertake a high value project or multiple low value projects, based on the actual profit versus time spent for each one.

Who tracks time and why

Time tracking is useful for businesses that:

• Work with clients and bill by the hour
• Have a combination of employees working in the office and/or work from home and/or work in the field
• Want to improve their productivity and their profitability

Kronometrics offers time tracking solutions. Contact us for a demo and see what time tracking can do for your business.