

From an economic standpoint, more billable hours can increase profits and create new opportunities for yourself and the company. You feel like you’re in a constant rush, which will soon reflect in the quality of your work.įew of you will get why time tracking is important. If things don’t go out as planned, everyone -not just the manager-can keep you accountable for it. Some of you have your work visible to the whole team and feel under pressure. It isn’t natural and requires tremendous cognitive power, an effort you can’t easily muster at the end of a full day. This means you need to remember what you’ve worked on, when, and for how long. Or, you find time tracking draining if you multitask daily. But down there, on the first line, you’re supposed to meet deadline after deadline to add these numbers up. To them, these are only numbers, just like stationery and office furniture. The problem is somewhere at the management level, you say to yourself, who wants to quantify everything to cut costs. You might fear being supervised to the minute-either by your boss or software that takes random screenshots of your desktop-and regard it as a useless, administrative task. Why is it so hard to track time when working This is all great, but what about you – the employee? Let’s see what makes it so hard to do real-time tracking when you work, and perhaps we can eventually agree that employee time tracking has nothing to do with employee monitoring but efficiency. They can also become more transparent towards their customers and inform them in real-time about the project’s progress. Through it, managers can accurately estimate task budgets and deadlines by monitoring how long they take on average. This doesn’t mean that time tracking can’t be useful. Sadly, some managers still use the 40-hour week as a benchmark for quality work. Even if they finish it faster, perfection sets in, and they’ll continue to fine-tune their work until the last moment-I’m guilty here too. That’s because, in general, people estimate they need more time to prepare for a task. Or, to put it simply, if you give someone a week to complete a 4-hour task, it will take them a week. It abides by Parkinson’s law, which states that work expands to fill the time available for its completion.

Notice something? Yes, time tracking is, in fact, psychologically linked to productivity. Plus, one common reason might be instant gratification turning us into procrastinators. It tricks us into thinking we can stay on top of our work by just showing up and filling in timesheets. This is a direct result of focusing on quantity instead of quality.

The rest of the time is filled with distracting activities like browsing social media, reading news and articles, and talking about non-work activities with colleagues, to name the top three. In fact, new research from the UK found that we’re productive at work for only 2 hours and 53 minutes. Nothing wrong with this finding, but let’s be honest: it’s easy to clock in 8 hours and get little to nothing done. As Harvard Business Review points out, the US economy is losing $7.4 billion a day, the result of 50 million untracked work hours. Based on this input, managers save time, cut costs, and improve operations with a clear business objective: increasing profits. The general premise is that employee time tracking is tied to productivity and project time tracking, which measures how efficient someone is at doing their job. If not, continue reading.ĥ Top-Rated Employee Time Tracking Software for 2022 The time tracking myth NOTE: If you already know why task and time tracking is important and are in the search of the top employee time tracking tools, we’ve put together a list of five top-rated employee time tracking software for 2022.
