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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.
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How to Streamline Your Billing Process with Zapier and Timing
One of the most common questions we hear at Timing is: How can I bill my clients for the time I track with Timing?
Thanks to the Timing Web App and its Zapier integration, we now have a much better answer to this question. Our Zapier integration lets you send your times to hundreds of other billing and time tracking services, such as FreshBooks, Quickbooks, Toggl, and many more!
Zapier is a web service that lets you connect thousands of apps, sending data from one service to another. For example, you can use the Timing web app together with Zapier to automatically export tasks, create projects, and even post messages to Slack when you start a task. Zapier automatically processes your data in the background, so you can keep focusing on your work at all times. Simply set your “Zap” once and forget about it — no extra work on your end.
Read on for a step-by-step guide on using Zapier to send your Timing tasks to FreshBooks for invoicing. This process works just as well for a whole lot of other invoicing apps, of course! Plus, we’ll inspire you with several more ideas for integrating your Timing data with other apps.
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How to Identify Your Flow Using Time-Tracking
“Flow” is a term that you may have heard thrown around quite a bit, but are you sure you know exactly what it is? It sounds undoubtedly positive, suggesting a state of effortless output and profound enjoyment. At the same time, flow sounds a bit nebulous. What is it, exactly? And most importantly, how do you identify your flow?
Think of it this way: Some days, you are super-productive and hyper-focused, so concentrated that you seem to lose track of hours passing, mealtimes, and the need to sleep. Other days, you feel like you are grinding away, maybe even fighting distraction while you try to work.
The first scenario, of course, is you in a state of flow – accomplishing your goals, checking off tasks, and enjoying work so much that it doesn’t feel like a slog. The second is you outside of flow – grinding away at your checklist while you attempt to stay off your iPhone.
Of course, you can’t always be in your flow, ideal as that would be. Still, there are certain ways to identify your flow, foster a flow-inducing environment, and get your best work done while you’re focused, goal-oriented, and maybe even having fun.
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Automate Time Tracking on your iPhone with Timing and Siri Shortcuts
Two weeks ago, we covered how to use the Timing Web App to start and stop tasks on the go. Today, you will learn how you can use Siri shortcuts to start and stop tasks, without having to open the web app at all. This means you can start tracking even faster than before — without wasting time loading the web app.
You can even come up with a custom voice command to open your shortcut — “do work”, “get it done”, “every day I’m hustling” — are all perfectly acceptable options. Let your imagination run freely. There’s nothing like commanding your phone to “get er done” at the start of a meeting…
