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Are You Prepared for the EU’s New Time Tracking Regulations?
Is your company meeting the new time tracking requirements set by the European court?
On May 14, 2019, the European Court of Justice ruled that European member states “must require employers to set up an objective, reliable and accessible system enabling the duration of time worked each day by each worker to be measured.”
The ruling comes after a lawsuit by the Comisiones Obreras (CCOO), a Spanish trade union, against Deutsche Bank. CCOO requested the German bank set up a system for tracking time each day, to help ensure labor laws were being met. Deutsche Bank argued against recording time due to the fact that Spanish law didn’t require it.
Ultimately ECJ decided that, “…in the absence of a system enabling the duration of time worked each day by each worker to be measured, it is not possible to determine, objectively and reliably, either the number of hours worked and when that work was done, or the number of hours of overtime worked, which makes it excessively difficult, if not impossible in practice, for workers to ensure that their rights are complied with.”
This measure is essential to ensure the maximum weekly working time — including overtime and rest periods have been complied with. This protects both employers and workers by verifying whether those rights are complied with.
Now that employees are responsible for tracking their time, are you worried about how your team will comply? Timing is the ideal solution!
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Are You Setting Yourself Up for a Productive Day?
Do you ever have one of those days where you can’t seem to focus your brain?
You might find yourself trying to get started on a task, but other things keep disrupting you. Or you might just feel a little tired and foggy.
We’ve all been there, and we know how frustrating those days can be. After all, we all have a lot of things to accomplish! These tasks are often tied to work, which directly impacts our income. That’s why having a productive day isn’t just beneficial for our mental well-being, but for our quality of life as well.
Though there are some life factors that you don’t have control over, you do have a say in how you start your day every morning.
That’s why we’ve pulled together our recommendations for waking up on the right side of the bed, ready to take on the day.
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Timing 2019.1: Undo Support and Usability Improvements
We are happy to announce the release of Timing 2019.1! Read on for the update’s full release notes.
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How to Get Your Employees to Start Tracking Time
In order to make smart, informed business decisions, you have to be acutely aware of how you are spending your time.
Freelancers tend to have a more innate realization of this, since the impact of time spent versus value received is more obvious. After all, it’s imperative to a freelancer’s direct income that he or she properly bill clients for hours spent working or projects delivered.
However, this concept also applies to larger businesses—actually even more so. If being conscious of time is important for a single worker, think of that significance as you multiply the amount of people working.
Productivity and awareness are critical to a lean team, and the impacts can seem more apparent on a smaller scale. But with a bigger team, the seemingly minor effects of wasted hours can add up—creating a big hole in productivity and earning potential for a business.
That’s why being cognizant of how your employees are spending their time each day can have such a colossal impact on your bottom line.
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MacSparky Video Guide for Timing now available!
We have partnered with David Sparks (also known as MacSparky) to create a five-part video guide on Timing! The first few videos offer a great way to get started with Timing, while the later ones dive deep into Timing’s more advanced features such as rules and manual tracking.
In particular, you will learn:
- How Timing can help make your time tracking easier and more accurate.
- How you can categorize your activities in Timing, letting you see exactly what you worked on at any given time.
- How you can manually capture time entries and calendar events or meetings into Timing.
- How you can set up your projects for maximum efficiency.
- What more advanced, “power user” features Timing offers.
Read on to watch all five videos!
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Becoming a Champ at Time Tracking
Time is arguably the most valuable currency in life. We are all allotted the same amount of it in a day, but we never know how much of it we will have in a lifetime. That’s why it is so precious.
In order to live a fulfilling life, we must be extremely cognizant of how we are spending our time each and every day.
Many of us would prefer to spend our time with family and friends, enjoying the simple pleasures of life, and feeding our brains.
However, we can’t do all those things without financial stability. Though money certainly isn’t the most important factor of life, it does award us freedom and security. Which is why time tracking is so important not just in terms of work, but our whole lives.
Maximizing productivity in our work lives means we are giving ourselves the opportunity to not work harder, but instead work smarter. Once we master this, we find we are able to spend less time making the income we need to live a balanced and rewarding life.
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How to Become a Freelancer (When You Already Have a Full-Time Job)
For a long, long time people have sidetracked from their primary jobs to do a little something extra. Whether for financial reasons, exploring a hobby, or personal fulfillment, it’s not out of the ordinary to feel the itch to branch out on your own a bit.
Thanks to more digitized communication, having a side hustle has become a lot more attainable. It’s also made it so that tapping into a secondary source of income isn’t confined to just having a store on Etsy (though that’s cool, too). Nowadays, you can take almost any talent—especially one that translates across digital properties—and use it to your advantage by becoming a freelancer.
Though freelancing may sound attractive (we mean, who doesn’t dream of ditching the 9-to-5 grind), we understand—and recommend—the need to dip your toe into the water before diving in headfirst.
Keep in mind that being a freelancer requires a certain kind of personality—one that is driven, organized, and realistic. But we know that has y-o-u written all over it, so let us share insider tips on how to get rolling.
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The Top Reasons to Track Time, Unrelated to Work
When we think about time tracking, we mostly think about it being a best practice for work purposes.
Tracking time boosts productivity, allows freelancers to accurately bill clients for projects, and gives us a better sense of how long a task may take (which can help both with planning and developing scopes of work).
But did you know that tracking time is also essential for your life outside of work?
Regardless of what fills your hours and days, time management is something nearly all of us struggle with.
We all have a lot of responsibilities and expectations, both from external and internal sources—work (of course), family obligations, friendships to nurture, personal health and wellness, and the daily maintenance of life.
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It’s Time to Take a Hard Look at Your Productivity
We hear a lot about productivity and how it’s one of the “secrets” to success.
After all, productivity is the basis of working smarter, not just harder (though working hard is certainly an important quality to embrace). This drive and mindset helps to complete projects or reach milestones within optimal timeframes.
And being productive is not just about spending less time on tasks—it’s more about maximizing the time you are occupying in a more valuable way. In doing so, you’re able to avoid jamming hurried work into a specified amount of time, and instead produce good work.
Productivity is definitely a hot topic in our society, especially since the introduction of modern technology. With all of our devices, notifications, and access to content, it’s easier than ever to give in to distractions that take your focus away from a particular task.
Even if you adhere to deadlines most of the time, it’s still helpful to take an audit of your productivity levels (or lack thereof) and put a process in place to improve them.
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How to Prepare for Time Off as a Freelancer
Ahhh vacation. It’s a beautiful word, isn’t it?
For many of us it prompts images of palm trees, colorful drinks, and long siestas.
The North American definition is “an extended period of leisure and recreation, especially one spent away from home or in traveling,” which we all know is parallel to a “holiday” in other locales around the world.
Basically, as an adult, it’s supposed to signify no work—sounds blissful, right?
As humans, we are meant to take time to recharge our batteries and fuel our souls with the people and things that make us happy. And not to say that work doesn’t make some of us happy (because that’s kind of a big goal in life), but it also occupies so much space in both our schedules and our minds that it’s healthy to get away every once in a while.
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