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The Full-Time Employee’s Guide to Time-Tracking
As a full-time employee, your pay isn’t necessarily connected to the specific amount of hours you work. That being said, time-tracking – keeping careful track of how you spend your working hours – may not sound like a valuable use of your effort.
Time-tracking, however, has the potential to transform your job, help you meet your goals, and give you powerful leverage with your employer.
Knowing how many hours you’re spending at work, and what exactly you’re doing during those hours, can help you:
- Increase your productivity
- Take control of your work schedule
- Get richer insight into your in-office and out-of-office working hours
- Gain leverage to ask for a raise or change in position
- And more…
In the following article, we’ll look at specific ways time-tracking can help you achieve the above, and potentially more.
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How to Stay Productive When Your Home Life Feels Unstable
Life happens. Although most of us prefer it when our lives are smooth and unproblematic, the reality is that most of us will experience personal crises at some time or another. Death in the family, chronic illness, divorce, parenting issues, and financial burdens are just a handful of problems that might come at us unexpectedly. As if these situations weren’t difficult enough on their own, you’ll most likely face an additional challenge during seasons like these: Learning to stay productive in the midst of emotional and mental stress.
In this article, we’ll look at how to remain productive and on-task during your working hours, even when your home life feels unstable.
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How to Create a Project- or Task-Specific Report in Timing
One of the most powerful benefits of using Timing is that it allows you to export instant reports that include details about how you’ve spent your working hours.
A detailed, project- or task-specific report can be especially useful when it comes to billing clients for your time–but it can also be used for:
- Reviewing your personal time usage on specific projects or clients,
- Estimating time usage/costs for similar projects or clients, and
- Leverage while proposing an increased rate to a client (or potentially, an employer).
In this article, we’ll take a look at how to create a report in Timing, as well as different types of reports you might want to generate to get richer insight into your most valuable resource: your time.
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10 Signs You Need to Start Tracking Your Time
Kayla Matthews, a productivity-obsessed writer from Pittsburgh, has been writing for nearly a decade about self-improvement and business efficiency. You can see her articles on sites like MakeUseOf, Inc.com, Information Age, and her blog, ProductivityTheory.com.
When you wake up every day, you know what you can expect based on your schedule. You might need to take notes at meetings or present to your team. Blocking off time for big events is easy, but how good are you when it comes to narrowing down what you’ll do in shorter periods?
Imagine you have two hours to work on assignments before your next meeting. You might tackle your duties by jumping in and not stopping for breaks, but then time slips by. Before you know it, you’ve barely accomplished anything and you have to leave.
This is one of the common ways people realize they aren’t as productive as they’d like to be. If you think that might be you, here are 10 signs that prove you need to start tracking your time. Once you try a few of these tips and start tracking time, you’ll breeze through your daily schedule and accomplish more than ever before.
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Tracking Time Spent in DEVONthink with Timing
If you are doing a lot of Deep Work, you might be spending hours performing research, writing, or crafting notes or presentations. Organizing all the information generated by these activities is a daunting task. Luckily, DEVONthink can help with that. DEVONthink is a data management system that can help professionals (and students) navigate and organize a wide range of documents at their disposal.
The challenge, however, with using this kind of system is tracking the time you spend on it. If you spend the majority of your workday on DEVONthink, it’s not necessarily helpful to see that you spent 7.5 hours on this app – when you know that you’ve worked on a whole range of different projects and subprojects.
Here’s the good news: Timing is now integrating with DEVONthink – giving you the power to track minutes and hours you spend on specific documents in this powerful data management system.
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The Freelancer’s Guide to Creating and Tracking Invoices
As a freelancer, you rely on invoices to get paid for your efforts. Creating useful invoices can mean the difference between getting paid on time and having to wait months before receiving payment.
Sending invoices is a vital part of being a freelancer. Creating a smooth invoicing process will help your cash flow remain steady and get you paid without too much hassle. Getting paid quickly happens when you have and utilize efficient procedures. If your clients don’t know what to do once they receive your invoice, it’s going to take extra time to get paid.
Today’s post will help you as a freelancer understand the best ways to create and track your invoices. When you have better project-tracking practices, you’re in a better place to get paid for all of your efforts.
Create Different Invoices For Various Types of Projects
There are two significant ways freelancers can charge for their services: hourly and per project. Each method has different types of invoicing and different ways to track work.
Billing hourly is simple to track. All you need to do is find a way to track the time spent on each project and charge for each hour you complete. Some clients have a maximum amount of time you can spend on their tasks each week. If this is the case, you need to have measures in place to stop you from working too much. If clients have listed a hard limit, they won’t pay you for any work done over that.
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Timing 2019.4: Paths for Search Queries, Google Docs and YouTube Videos, Duplicating Projects, and More!
We are happy to announce the release of Timing 2019.4!
Read on for more details on all of the new features.
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How To Use Time Tracking To Beat the 9-to-5 Grind and Work Fewer Hours
Conventional wisdom has told us that working from 9 to 5 is how you support yourself and your family, build wealth, and save for retirement. But things have changed.
Younger workers, especially millennials, are looking for more out of their occupations than a steady income and a 401k. People want work-life balance, flexibility, and jobs that combine skill, passion, and purpose.
With the advent of digital nomadism and cloud-based systems, working when you want and where you want is more common than ever. In fact, by 2027, freelancers are anticipated to make up a majority of the U.S. workforce (!)
In theory, freelancers have the ability to mold their own schedules, pursue their own clients, and work exactly where they want — whether that’s on their living room couch, at a local coffee shop, or heck, at a downtown brewery.
That all sounds heavenly to us. But is it realistic to work as a freelancer, and still work fewer than 8 hours a day?
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Time-Tracking Hacks for Students
One of the joys of being a student is managing your own time. If you’re a night owl, you can study until 2 AM and sleep in. If you’re an early bird, you can frontload all your work into the first half of your day, and be finished by 1 PM. But time management for students can be tricky, especially with distractions from your social life, extracurriculars, and more.
Thankfully, there are hacks to time management that still help you create the lifestyle you’re looking for. These strategies can even raise your grades, help you meet your academic goals, and cut down time spent in the library.
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How to Manage Your Team’s Projects and Times with Timing and Zapier
Please note: while you can still use the guide below for managing your team with Zapier, we now offer Timing for Teams, which is much more convenient.
Two weeks ago, we explained how you can use Timing with Zapier to streamline your billing process. Today, we will build on these foundations to help you manage your team’s projects and times through Zapier. If you are unfamiliar with the process of connecting Timing to Zapier, have a look at that article for a detailed example.
In particular, you can have Zapier automatically create projects for each of your team members, then send their tracked time to a shared Google Sheet for reporting. That way, you can quickly consolidate your time tracking and billing in one place.
