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The Complete Guide to Project Time Tracking
Image: Louise ViallesoubranneWhile there are many variable metrics that feed into project management, there are always three primary pillars: quality, cost and time. In order to pull off a successful project, you need to complete high-quality work within an agreed budget and a set timeframe. Everything flows from there. Project time tracking is critical to how you manage the third pillar, and affects pillars one and two as well.
When you start a project, you have to assess how much time you need to produce good work. And you need to consider how many of these hours are billable hours, and how much profit you’re likely to make. Keeping track of these hours as the project progresses is important, too. How much time have you used to date? Are you on track? And when you finally invoice, was your original estimation accurate?
An automatic project time tracking tool (like Timing) is the best way to predict, manage, and evaluate the time you spend on a particular project. Let’s look at project time tracking in more detail, including why it’s so important and how to implement it.
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How Flex Time Can Improve Work-Life Balance and Job Satisfaction
Image: Christine HumeFlex time, flexitime or flexible hours. It’s often one of the things that draws freelancers to self-employment in the first place, and especially since the pandemic, has become increasingly common among larger companies, too. It refers to the ability (as the name suggests) to be flexible in how you manage your time. It offers some important benefits.
Studies have shown, for example, that flextime decreases work-related stress, boosts job satisfaction, and leads to a greater work-life balance. This is because it can often be difficult to deal with domestic responsibilities like caring for your home, looking after children, and attending to health concerns if your working hours are cast in stone. A little flexibility, however, makes it easier to stay on top of your different commitments. If you’re an employer, there are advantages for you, too, such as increasing productivity and reducing absenteeism and employee turnover.
Let’s take a closer look at what flex time means, and answer some of your questions. What are the pros? Are there any cons? And how can you make a flexible working arrangement part of your business?
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Time Efficiency Matters — Here’s How to Get it Right
Whether you’re paid on an hourly, daily or project basis, being efficient with your time is critical to your success. You’ve got to produce strong work in a reasonable amount of time if you’re going to maintain and grow your business. But time efficiency isn’t as easy as it sounds. With time sinks waiting around every corner to distract you and slow you down, working efficiently takes practice and dedication.
Here, we’ll take a look at what it means to be time efficient and why it’s so important. We’ll also offer five time efficiency tips to help you use your time as well as possible. (Spoiler alert: tracking your time on an app like Timing is a good place to start!)
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Top 10 Time Management Tips: Work Less, Achieve More
Image: Firmbee.com
What constitutes a working week for most people? Does the old Monday to Friday, 9am to 5pm, norm still stand? Well, if the results of the world’s biggest four-day workweek trial are anything to go by: probably not. In fact, it’s likely safe to say that the working week revolution is underway. Now more than ever, businesses are using smart time management tips that can help professionals live more productive balanced lives.
The old nine-to-five workweek structure goes back over 200 years. So, it’s been due for a revamp for quite some time. Part of dismantling this system and implementing a new solution, however, has involved understanding how to manage time effectively.
Freelancers and professionals who need to bill time accurately have always understood the importance of effective time management strategies. The pandemic fuelled interest in this issue among broader business groups. We balanced our professional endeavors with our domestic commitments in increasingly blurred ways during the early 2020s. And as we did, we started to ask ourselves: are there time management tips that could help us do more and work less?
The answer is yes. Let’s dive in.
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Time Sink Be Gone: Find and Eliminate the Tasks that Waste Your Time
It can be hard to tell where the hours go sometimes. Your day starts off well enough, with only one meeting and a few seemingly achievable deadlines. But by the end of the day, you still haven’t ticked everything off today’s to-do list, and have only added to tomorrow’s. The culprit? One time sink after another, sneaking their way into your day.
The ramifications of losing minutes, hours, and sometimes even days to a time sink or two can be serious. Unless you stay on top of things, the quality of your work could suffer, you could miss out on opportunities, and your income could stall. It isn’t an exaggeration to say that a time sink that’s deep enough could affect the viability of your business.
Let’s take a look at what time sinks are all about, and how you can eliminate them, wrap up unfinished projects, boost your productivity, and ensure your business growth. (Psst: A time-management tool like Timing can help!)
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Increase Project Profitability with These 7 Simple Strategies
Image: Vlada Karpovich Project profitability is one of the essential factors in building a thriving business. It helps you determine 1) whether or not a client is worth your time, effort, and resources and 2) which clients to prioritize. Due to this, project profitability is one of the most “bottom-line” minded measurements and one you should learn how to calculate and use to maximize your revenue and fuel growth.
In this post, we’ll explain what project profitability is precisely, why it’s important, how to calculate it, and steps you can take to improve your profitability on a project basis. Let’s jump right in.
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Time Management Matrix: How to Focus on What’s Important
When we’re busy at work or in our personal lives, it’s easy to become overwhelmed by long lists of tasks. We often rush to check items off our to-do list, regardless of their value or timeline. This behavior feels like getting things done, even though not all tasks are the same, and most of them will never help us achieve our goals. But you can get past all that with the Time Management Matrix, which is also called the “Eisenhower Matrix”.
You see, productivity isn’t about working harder or longer – that’s poor time management. Yes, simply working more will cross more items off your list, but it rarely helps create real change in your life. That’s why productivity is more about doing the right things.
How do you work on the right tasks? With prioritization.
Prioritization seems simple, but it’s an advanced skill that few people do well. It’s hard to look at our work objectively and accept that some won’t happen, especially when we’re overwhelmed.
The Time Management Matrix is a powerful tool to organize your work based on importance and urgency. It helps you focus on the tasks that matter most and avoid the ones that don’t help you achieve your goals.
This article explains the Eisenhower Matrix, its advantages, who it’s for, and how it works. Then we offer some tips to use it well.
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Google Calendar Time Insights: A Comprehensive Guide
Image: Gaining VisualsHow much time do you spend in meetings every week? For many of us, it’s more than we would like to admit. But if you want to know for sure, it’s best to use a dedicated tool, like Google Calendar Time Insights. With the information this feature offers, you can assess whether meetings are occupying too much of your time, and make the necessary adjustments so that you can stay focused, improve your productivity, and enjoy a better work-life balance.
According to this article, 78% of workers believe their meeting schedules are chaotic, with 38% blaming upper management and 16% blaming their direct manager. An incredible 64% of employees are only excited about meetings when they’re well-planned, which isn’t always the case. If left ungoverned, meetings can often become long, tedious and unproductive, pulling people away from completing actual work.
Does this mean that all meetings are pointless? Absolutely not. Some are critical. Others add value, even if they’re not essential. And sometimes it is just nice to have a conversation with and bounce ideas off other humans, especially if you work remotely.
To stay productive and get the most value out of your work, however, it is important to determine how much time you’re spending in meetings, and to know which are important and which, quite literally, could have been an email.
Google Calendar Time Insights can help with this. It’s a simple tool that helps you track meeting times. Let’s take an in-depth look at how it works.
(Want to get some of your questions answered straight away? Simply skip to our frequently asked questions section at the end.)
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Employee Monitoring vs. Time Tracking: How to Help Your Team Do Their Best Work
According to a survey by MIT, 34% of the US workforce has shifted to some type of remote work arrangement. The COVID-19 pandemic didn’t start the remote work trend, but it certainly accelerated it. For many businesses, the only options were to transition to remote work or close down.
This shift presents a challenge for some employers and team leaders. Where once they could monitor their team’s progress by simply roaming the office and having casual conversations, now they need to enlist digital tools to collect data on how their teams spend their time.
Because of this shift, some people are fearful of personal data security. We know the benefits of having our data harvested and analyzed, but we’re also aware of the risks. If a company doesn’t handle our data appropriately, we become exposed to abuse and privacy violations. The potential dangers make many people wary of digital tracking tools that monitor our actions, what we create, and the types of information we access.
As an employer or team leader, you naturally want information regarding the activities and productivity of your team. You need that data to make intelligent business decisions. But how much is too much? What are the appropriate types of information to track? Like many employers, you’re probably wrestling with these questions and more.
There are two main options for studying your team’s work and helping them do their best: employee monitoring and time tracking. This article explains these options and why traditional employee monitoring is too heavy-handed for modern workers.
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What it Means to Be an Autonomous Team and 10 Steps to Create Team Autonomy
Steve Jobs famously said, “It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.”
Lee Iacocca shared a similar view: “I hire people brighter than me and get out of their way.”
Whether you’re building an internal team or hiring external contractors, you can often create a significant impact on your business by giving great people the freedom to solve problems in their own way. They produce better results, create more efficiencies, enable innovation, and overcome challenges in ways you might not otherwise.
But to get the most value out of great people, you must give them autonomy. With autonomy, they will work to their potential, and your business will reap the benefits of their knowledge and experience.
This article provides an overview of what it means to be an autonomous team. We discuss the characteristics of autonomous teams and offer some critical steps to create your own.
