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9 Tips to Bill Time Accurately and Boost Your Bottom Line
Image: Wes HicksDoes your business bill time for each project? If so, you’ll know how important it is to track your time accurately. You need to know exactly how much time a particular project takes so that you can quote and invoice correctly, and you need to have a clear sense of whether you’re working productively or if there are more hours you could be billing.
There are countless businesses that operate this way. Those in the legal profession will be all too familiar with this approach, as will accountants, consultants and creatives, including copywriters, designers and developers. Freelancers across industries, who account for 36% of the workforce in the US, as well as agencies, regularly break their work down into hours and bill their time accordingly.
But even if you’re familiar with logging your time, are you sure you’re maximizing your billable hours? Are you working smartly and efficiently? Could you be billing more for your projects and boosting your bottom line? We’re here to offer some handy tips on making your time work for you, and to answer your questions, too.
Take a look at our comprehensive list of tips to help you bill for time — and develop a more successful business while you’re at it.
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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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Screen Time for Mac: Everything You Need to Know
Image source: Damian PatkowskiBeing aware of how we spend our time can help us be more productive and focused. By revealing patterns of behavior, it can also help us to find a balance between the time we spend on different activities. But how do we know where our time is going? Using a time tracking tool such as Screen Time for Mac is a useful place to start. (But, it’s not the only option!)
Screen Time was an iPhone and iPad feature first, but it’s been available across all Apple devices, including Macs, for some time. Mac Screen Time first came out with macOS 10.15 Catalina, and has continued to be available on all subsequent versions, including macOS 11 Big Sur, macOS 12 Monterey and macOS 13 Ventura.
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The Dangers of Work Overload and How to Avoid It (for You and Your Team)
Whether you’re the team leader, part of a team, or work for yourself, you’ve probably dealt with work overload. It’s a tricky condition that creeps up in organizations of any size. If work overload is unchecked, it can profoundly impact your people and work products.
In this article, we dive into work overload, its impact, and the steps you can take to avoid it. You can save your team from burnout and continue producing high-quality work with the right processes and tools.
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Billable Hours and Non-billable Hours: How Time Tracking Tools Can Help You Find Balance
Allocating your time correctly is a freelancing necessity, and that means understanding and knowing how to manage your billable hours and non-billable hours. More than that, you need to be able to find the right balance between the two.
Billable hours are important, they’re the money generators. But they’re often only possible because you’ve spent non-billable time working on marketing your business and refining your sales pitch. Non-billable hours, however, don’t earn you any direct income. So while they’re often critical to your business growth, it can be hard to tell whether they’re worthwhile and to what extent.
Figuring out how to make your billable and non-billable time work for you can be tricky, but it’s not impossible. And getting it right can help to maximize your productivity, remove inefficiencies in your business, and boost your bottom line. We’re here to show you how.
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Why Time Tracking is Critical for Remote Teams
Remote work is here to stay. While some companies still resist this new cultural trend, many embrace it. According to a study by The New York Times, 68% of employers “allow workers to telecommute as needed.” This trend was picking up speed before the pandemic, but COVID-19 seriously boosted it.
It’s no surprise that workers are happier and more productive when they control where and when they work. Some work better in the early hours before the rest of the world wakes up. Others prefer to work in the evening. Some sit at their cozy, in-home office, while others tour their city, visiting new cafes, parks, and libraries.
Remote work is popular among families, as well. Childcare costs are more expensive than ever, so working from home while kids play can be a significant income bump.
As remote work becomes mainstream, organizations must implement new workflows, systems, and tools to support this work style. They are finding new ways to manage their changing workforce, and one vital tool of this transition is time tracking.
We’ve discussed the benefits of time tracking in the past and the importance of using time tracking for teams. In this article, we want to focus on remote teams and the benefits time tracking offers for businesses and people.
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Key Features and Benefits You Need in a Team Time Tracking App
You’ve decided that time tracking is right for your team due to the potential productivity and work/life balance benefits. Now you’re ready to get started.
You’ll need a team time tracking app to track time accurately and reliably with as little disruption to your business and team as possible. While teams previously used paper forms and punched clocks to record time, those methods have become outdated and inefficient. We’re in the digital age; you need a powerful app.
A proper time tracking tool is more than just a stopwatch. It’s easy to use, records detailed information about individual activities, and keeps private data private. It lets teams work their best and administrators manage effectively.
But which time tracking app should you choose? Admittedly, several are available, so you must search for the right app for your organization. Consider your options carefully because this tool can profoundly impact your team’s performance.
This article lists the most important features you should look for in a potential time tracking app. Don’t settle on a tool until it meets these criteria.
(Before you dive in, consider browsing our complete guide on team time tracking. It’s a great primer on tracking the time of a group, including how time tracking works, the benefits you can get from it, and how to implement it in your team.)
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Screen Time on Your iPhone, iPad and Mac: The Definitive Guide in 2025
It probably goes without saying, but we couldn’t live without them: our digital devices are arguably among the most indispensable parts of our personal and professional lives, connecting us to friends, family, colleagues, and the rest of the world for a multitude of reasons numerous times a day.
How many times a day exactly? A recent survey found that US smartphone users checked their phones an average of once every four minutes in 2021, a dramatic increase from a 2019 study, which put this figure at once every 10 minutes. Whatever our habits, if we look at our Screen Time report, many of us will likely find that we’re spending at least a month a year on our phones—maybe more.
But is every one of these instances worthwhile? Are we using our time productively, to learn, work and be entertained, or are we simply whiling away the hours? When it comes to our phones, tablets and computers, where is the line between help and hindrance, and can being aware of our screen time help us to manage our phone usage better?
Let’s look at how monitoring the apps you’re using through Screen Time on iPhone can help you to be more aware of your time, and boost your productivity in the process. We’ll also ask whether there are any alternatives for you to consider. (Spoiler alert: there are!)
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The Complete Guide to Team Time Tracking
As a team leader, you want your team members to be as productive as possible to make the team (and your overall organization) successful. You also want them to be happy, satisfied workers who don’t struggle with burnout or underappreciation. You can manage both of these concerns with team time tracking.
At one point, we used time tracking only to calculate salaries and paid time off. But in the age of data, time tracking offers numerous additional benefits – for businesses and individual employees. To be competitive, you should take advantage of this powerful technique
In this guide on team time tracking, we explain what it is, how it works, the benefits you can get from it, and how to implement it in your team.
As a team leader, you want your team members to be productive, happy, and satisfied without struggling with burnout or underappreciation. You can manage all of that with team time tracking. Share on X -
How to Track Employee Time Effectively: Manual vs Automatic Time Tracking
To track or not to track… That was the question.
Not anymore.
To track manually or automatically – that is the question of today’s importance. Because of poor time tracking habits and, consequently, untracked time, US companies lose $8.8 billion per day.
Image author: Annie Spratt
Businesses still face burdensome disagreements around employee work hours and struggle to decide how to monitor the latter efficiently. Let’s take the controversy around old-fashioned paper timesheets vs digitally-driven solutions for worker time monitoring.
Are you still using paper timesheets or have you already switched to digital methods and productivity apps?
You’ll definitely change your mind in favor of automatic tools after reading this article. Dive in.
