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.

Boost Your Productivity

What are your career goals? Maybe you want to start your own business someday. Maybe you’d like to retire early and pursue a different passion. Or maybe you’re interested in climbing to the top of the corporate ladder.

In any case, one of the single most important keys for helping to reach your goals is greater productivity.

Greater productivity makes you a better employee, develops habits where you enjoy your job more, expands your responsibilities (and potentially pay), and helps to reach your personal goals.

Here’s how time-tracking can help to boost your personal productivity at work:

Keeps You Accountable

Unless you’re a superhuman (or a robot), chances are that you find yourself tempted by distractions throughout the day. Whether it’s Instagram, the news, or text messages, most of us know how quickly a glance at your phone or new browser window can turn into a rabbit hole.

Even your email inbox can turn into a productivity-sucking source of stress and distraction. One study found that when people check their inboxes only three times a day, their stress levels decreased and sense of productivity and accomplishment increased.

Using a time-tracking tool like Timing can help you remain accountable to staying on task by showing you exactly how much time you’ve spent on your laptop or desktop computer…what you were doing during those hours….and how productive you were.

At the end of each day (or throughout the day), you’ll check your “Overview” tab in Timing, where you’ll see a detailed breakdown of where you’ve spent each hour (and minute). You’ll also see a “Productivity” score, which is assigned according to project.

Helps You Meet Your Short-Term Goals

A wise strategy for productively approaching your workday is to set three specific goals that you can meet by the end of the day. Time-tracking with Timing can help you meet these short-term goals with a couple of different features:

• Creating a task allows you to set a start-and-stop timer for a specific task. For example, if you want to spend the next two hours working on a project proposal, create a task for the proposal, set your timer, and get to work!
• Again, use the “Overview” tab at the close of each workday to see if you’ve accomplished your list of three goals. If not, take note of what distracted you from succeeding.

Gives You Richer Insight into Your Working Hours

Do you ever feel that you’re spending the majority of your workday putting out fires instead of getting real, productive work done?

Time-tracking can help you take control of your workday – and your productivity – by giving you a comprehensive look at how you’re spending your total working hours.

For example, if you find that you’re spending a significant amount of time on non-priority work, or a client, account, or project that’s demanding but not high-value, time-tracking will reveal that reality to you with hard data.

With Timing, you can view when you’re using specific applications, visiting specific URL’s, and working on specific client work. Timing also offers an API and a Zapier integration with various applications and systems to give you even richer insight into how you are spending your time.

Ultimately, you’ll gain a better understanding of how you’re using your working hours…and how you might shift your time and productivity to create a more streamlined (and less stressful) workday.

Improve Your Remote Work

If you frequently work remotely, time-tracking can become even more of an asset to you as a full-time employee.

43% of employees work remotely at least part of the time, and while most of us appreciate the freedom and flexibility this provides, working out of office comes with its own set of challenges – including staying on task and communicating effectively.

As described above, time-tracking can help you resist distractions (which seem to multiply when we’re out of the office), but it can also help you report back to an employer who’s not peeking over your shoulder.

Using the “Reports” feature in Timing, you can produce detailed, specific evidence of your working hours for your employer. Not only that, but Timing can also be used on your mobile phone, so that you can easily track hours spent offline (such as during a lunchtime meeting or extended phone call).

Ultimately, time-tracking can help you become a more efficient, productive remote worker. Click To Tweet It may even give you leverage for asking your employer to allow you to work remotely more frequently (which we’ll get to next).

Gain Leverage with Your Boss

Whether you want to ask for a raise, change in position, or request to work from home some of the time (or all of the time), time-tracking results can serve as powerful proof of your value and hard work to your employer.

As mentioned above, the “Reports” feature in Timing produces detailed reports that show how many hours you’ve worked, and on what. Depending on how you’re using your time, you can use this kind of data to show your employer that you’re spending additional time on developing systems and processes, or working more productively from home than in the office, or working overtime.

In any case, you’ll have the numbers to back up your claims and help persuade your employer to say “yes” to your request.

A Note for Employers

So far, we’ve reviewed how time-tracking can be used for employees. But what about employers?

In 2019, the EU established new time-tracking regulations that mandate that all 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.”

For employers in the EU, Timing can be used to generate time-tracking data and meet this requirement.

Even employers not in the EU may want to consider using a detailed time-tracking system for their employees. Doing so can help give business owners and managers deeper insight into how employees are accomplishing tasks and spending their working hours – helping them to shift responsibilities or create new positions where necessary.

Using Timing for Full-Time Work

Timing is a comprehensive time-tracking platform that can be used by both full-time employees and employers to gain powerful insight and improve working hours and workflows. Offering various application integrations, in-depth insight into productivity levels, and customizable reporting, scheduling, and organizational tools, Timing is ideal for those looking for detailed insight and precisely accurate data. To try it for free, click here.