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How to Log Work Hours for Yourself and Your Team
Image: Christina Morillo
One of the most fundamental yet vital parts of completing any project is accurately logging work hours. Whether working solo or managing a team, keeping track of hours is essential to ensure clients get billed correctly and meet compliance standards.
Fortunately, we live in an age where this process is more efficient and streamlined than ever, and you’re not stuck punching that antiquated time clock.
In this post, we’ll explain how to log work hours and helpful tools you can use to make it as simple as possible. We’ll also go over best practices and common mistakes so you get started on the right foot.
Let’s jump right in.
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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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Mac Keyboard Shortcuts: Your Key to Faster, More Efficient Work
As a Mac user, you likely spend a significant amount of time typing on your keyboard. While the mouse or trackpad is a useful tool for pointing and clicking, constantly moving your hand to use it can disrupt your workflow and slow down your productivity. This is where the best keyboard shortcuts for Mac come in handy. By memorizing and utilizing these shortcuts, you can streamline your workflow and accomplish tasks more efficiently. And when combined with the right productivity tools, like those highlighted in our guide to the best productivity apps for Mac, you can take your efficiency to the next level.
According to this study, people waste an average of 2 seconds per minute by switching between mouse and keyboard — that’s 3% of your workday! Learning just one keyboard shortcut could save you several hours each year. And for those who work on a computer for eight hours per day, keyboard shortcuts can save up to 8 workdays per year. Not to mention the fact that using keyboard shortcuts can also make you happier, because you are less likely to be interrupted by having to navigate menus and can thus stay in a “flow” state for longer, which is known to be beneficial to work satisfaction.
In this article, we’ll explore some essential Mac keyboard shortcuts and provide tips on how to discover and remember them to boost your productivity, to help you be more efficient, productive and happy at work!
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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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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 (Updated 2023)
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.
