\u201cTiming is probably the most awesome timing app that I have ever used\u2026really, really simple to set up, simple to configure, simple to convince the team\u2026\u201d says David.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
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David Foreman is the Managing Director of Toast Design<\/a>, a UK-based, full-service design agency. The agency was founded in 1997 and has a team of 15 people covering branding, print work, web design, and support and maintenance for WordPress websites.<\/p>\n \u201cWe’re in an old Victorian townhouse in Oxfordshire, split over three floors,\u201d says David. \u201cAnd the way that we work is we have departments, so we have a branding department, a print department, and a digital team.\u201d While most of the team come into the Oxfordshire studio, they\u2019ve adopted a flexible, hybrid arrangement where several team members work remotely part of the time.<\/p>\n Toast Design is all about encouraging a team dynamic where everyone pitches in. \u201cWe are very much a team,\u201d David says. \u201cEveryone’s involved in the running of the business rather than just doing the work.\u201d<\/p>\n Agencies like Toast Design need to track their time to ensure that; 1) they\u2019re using their time efficiently and 2) the quotes they provide for potential work are as accurate as possible.<\/p>\n The daily work for team members covers a mixture of individual tasks and pitching in on different projects. This diversity of functions means that their time may be spent on various tasks, and sometimes tracking that time has been a challenge for both individuals and the team. \u201cWe don\u2019t work in silos,\u201d says David, \u201ceveryone pitches in on early stages of design work. So we all sit together and discuss the work that we’re doing.\u201d<\/p>\n Furthermore, Toast Design may have different billing structures for different projects. According to David, some are billed based on the project, and others by the hour, requiring tracking and accounting for every minute.<\/p>\n With that said, David is also conscious of changes within the design industry and the need to stay on top of those changes while remaining profitable. \u201cEspecially with, you know, pay $5,000 a month, get an unlimited designer. Our industry is changing quite a lot,\u201d he says. Time tracking can help the agency to establish a baseline should they opt to change their pricing models in the future.<\/p>\n The nature of the projects that Toast Design works on can vary. David describes: \u201cWe have projects that go very smoothly and quickly, and we have other projects that take a little bit longer than we anticipated and quoted for.\u201d<\/p>\n One of the major challenges, especially with those more complex projects, is that time spent on them can be difficult to track, particularly if different tasks are completed on a piecemeal basis. An email here. A phone call there. An hour spent on a quick change request.<\/p>\n To add to this, Toast Design uses various tools in their work, including dev URLs for WordPress, SEMRush, Google Drive, and Basecamp. Time-tracking apps they\u2019ve tried previously required them to manually stop and start timers and attribute work between apps to different projects. Despite people\u2019s best efforts, there were often inaccuracies where project time wasn\u2019t correctly attributed, or someone didn\u2019t turn on or off their timers.<\/p>\n David says that team members often genuinely didn\u2019t realize how much time they\u2019d spend on a task and estimated based on their feelings of the task. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n \u201cWhen you get designers to track their own time, they’ll say that something that took an hour took 20 minutes,\u201d he says. \u201cIf they’re doing a task that they really love, like doing some logo concepts, they’ll turn three hours into an hour and a half, just based on, (I guess) it’s the psychology,\u201d says David. \u201cI really love this task, so, you know, two hours feels like 20 minutes, and I hate this task, so 15 minutes feels like an hour.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n What about other time-tracking apps that Toast Design tried out? \u201cOh, it was impossible to track with other apps,\u201d says David. \u201cNothing we’ve used in the past has enabled us to build such complicated tracking rules for each project.\u201d<\/p>\n After finding it via a Google search, David first tested out Timing for himself. From there, he rolled it out to the rest of the team. Did anyone have any hesitation over adopting Timing? \u201cIt was really the print guys that were a little bit more hesitant over having their time tracked. So I asked them to put it on their machines for a couple of weeks, just to see how it would work and what it would tell them,\u201d says David.<\/p>\n \u201cOnce they saw what it did, they were all very impressed, and it’s quite interesting how different types of designers like Timing in different ways.\u201d Toast Design has seen some great, game-changing benefits:<\/p>\n One team member, in particular, found that using Timing to track her time revealed how fragmented her day was becoming, moving from small task to small task. \u201cWe were able to delegate some of those tasks and basically give her her day back,\u201d says David. \u201cShe would definitely say that it freed up her time.\u201d<\/p>\n Additionally, Timing revealed how much time across the team was spent on smaller tasks. \u201cWithin a couple of weeks of testing it was showing how much time people spent on email per day, which was a real eye-opener,\u201d David says.<\/p>\n David describes attempting to track team time as \u201cimpossible\u201d with previous apps that Toast Design tried. Timing for Teams<\/a> has changed the game, allowing them to share projects accurately with team members and attribute that time.<\/p>\n \u201cWe’re able to set up different teams with Timing,\u201d David says. \u201cSo we have a digital team, the studio team, and the branding team. And basically, when we add projects in, we’ll add those to that particular team.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Timing allows Toast Design to correctly attribute work done for teams, no matter who did it. \u201cAll the team members here are kind of on each team within Timing,\u201d says David, \u201cbecause I primarily do web work, but I might go and spend 25 minutes working on a branding project with one of the branding teams. So because of that collaborative nature of working and the fact that we might do a chunk of work here and a chunk of work there, again, that’s one of the great things about Timing; it just picks up on all of that stuff.\u201d<\/p>\n The ability to create complex tracking rules has allowed Toast Design to accurately track and attribute time across different programs and work modes. <\/p>\n \u201cNothing we’ve used in the past has enabled us to build such complicated tracking rules for each project,\u201d David says. \u201cI think that makes it unique and, above all the rest, is this ability just to set up really quite complicated rules<\/a>.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n For example, our extensible rules system can automatically categorize almost all of your activities \u2013 simply drag an activity while keeping the \u2325 key pressed to permanently assign it to a project.<\/p>\n Over time, Timing will save you hours of manual categorization effort, not to mention all the time you\u2019d normally spend starting and stopping manual timers.<\/p>\n \u201cWe’ll be using SEMRush, we’ll be using Google Drive, and each one of those separate apps we spend quite a lot of time in,\u201d says David. \u201cAnd because of the way Timing works, we are able to plug all those different things into Timing. So, for example, a Google Drive folder for a client will have a specific identifier in the URL\u2026 And when one of my team spends 25 minutes on an SEO spreadsheet, it automatically goes against the client. Same with Basecamp, same with their client URL, the Dev URL. It just automatically pulls everything in, which is what makes it so special.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n The \u201ccreative versus commercial\u201d time can be a sticking point for design teams. The creative process can look different for different team members, while Toast Design wants to emphasize the quality of the final result.<\/p>\n \u201cOne of the designers on the branding team is a little bit more of a branding designer, so he likes to wander around thinking,\u201d says David. \u201c[A] bit more time away from the desk. So they found that a little bit more challenging because there were these \u2018holes\u2019 that had unallocated time. Once they get back to their desk, they’ve got the popup [from Timing] saying, what did you do? And it just makes it so easy to say, \u2018yeah, I was working on Project X,\u2019\u201d he says.<\/p>\n \u201cSo if a rule doesn’t catch something, usually it’s because people are away from their desk, you know, having a team meeting, or gone for a walk to think about something. So it prompts you to connect all that, to add all that time into Timing.\u201d<\/p>\n David says that past attempts at time tracking often failed because the process was too manual for team members.<\/p>\n \u201cYou know, we tried every type of timesheet you can imagine, from pads that they fill in on their desks to apps that we use for projects that have a timing (feature),\u201d says David. <\/p>\n \u201cBut nothing worked quite as well as Timing because they (the team) didn’t have to remember to stop and to start, and it was actually a real eye opener for them because they can see how much time they’re truly spending on things.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Timing is a native Mac app that automatically tracks your work so you can accurately record timesheets without having to start and stop timers. It does this by automatically recording how much time you spend on each app, document, and website.<\/p>\n David likes to use the reporting features of Timing<\/a> to track how the business is doing as a whole. \u201cI’m able to see a very top-level kind of view of where time has gone,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n \u201cI like to see when people have done a full week or a full month. I can ping a quick email and say \u2018really good month\u2019\u201d, says David. \u201cBut we don’t use it for staff KPIs or in staff reviews. It’s more of an overview of what’s going on in the agency.\u201d<\/p>\nWhy Track Time?<\/h2>\n
Key Challenges With Time Tracking<\/h2>\n
How Timing Was a Game-changer for Toast Design<\/h2>\n
Tracking Effective Use of Time<\/h3>\n
Tracking Team Time<\/h3>\n
Tracking Across Different Programs<\/h3>\n
Tracking Creative Time<\/h3>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/timingapp.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/06\/time_tracking_meeting_details-770x748.webp\"){kind=tracking}
<\/p>\nAutomatic Time Tracking Without Manual Time Sheets<\/h3>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/timingapp.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/06\/automatic_time_tracking-770x459.png\"){kind=tracking}
<\/p>\nTracking the Business as a Whole<\/h3>\n