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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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Employee Monitoring vs. Time Tracking: How to Help Your Team Do Their Best Work
According to a survey by MIT, 34% of the US workforce has shifted to some type of remote work arrangement. The COVID-19 pandemic didn’t start the remote work trend, but it certainly accelerated it. For many businesses, the only options were to transition to remote work or close down.
This shift presents a challenge for some employers and team leaders. Where once they could monitor their team’s progress by simply roaming the office and having casual conversations, now they need to enlist digital tools to collect data on how their teams spend their time.
Because of this shift, some people are fearful of personal data security. We know the benefits of having our data harvested and analyzed, but we’re also aware of the risks. If a company doesn’t handle our data appropriately, we become exposed to abuse and privacy violations. The potential dangers make many people wary of digital tracking tools that monitor our actions, what we create, and the types of information we access.
As an employer or team leader, you naturally want information regarding the activities and productivity of your team. You need that data to make intelligent business decisions. But how much is too much? What are the appropriate types of information to track? Like many employers, you’re probably wrestling with these questions and more.
There are two main options for studying your team’s work and helping them do their best: employee monitoring and time tracking. This article explains these options and why traditional employee monitoring is too heavy-handed for modern workers.
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Introducing Timing for Teams: Share Projects and Time Entries with Your Entire Team!
We are happy to announce the release of Timing 2021.1, featuring Timing for Teams!
Timing for Mac has always been a great way to track your time as an individual.
However, so far it has been cumbersome to coordinate your Timing projects across multiple team members.
Gathering timesheets from all team members has also been a difficult task, with a lot of emailing to collect all the needed reports.That’s where the brand-new Timing for Teams comes in.
It lets you share projects with team members and view their time entries in the Timing web app.
And with the year having just started, now is the ideal time to get your team’s time tracking in order!Read on for more information on how the new feature works, and how you can get the most out of it! Read More…
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Timing 2020.10: Completely New Design & Ready for macOS Big Sur!
We are happy to announce the release of Timing 2020.10, featuring a whole new design and full compatibility with macOS Big Sur!
This summer, when Apple announced sweeping design changes coming to macOS Big Sur, we took the opportunity to refresh the design of Timing on all versions of macOS. This is the result:
As you can see, we touched every bit of Timing’s interface, reducing visual noise and focusing on the stuff that you are here for: what you spent your time on.
But that’s not all — Timing has an all-new icon, created by Matthew Skiles:
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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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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…
