It was just a matter of ‘time’! Timeular talks about tracking your time!

Understand the 5 reasons time tracking methods do not work so you can procure a solution that does!

At Timeular, we’re pretty obsessed with everything related to time. As engineers, developers, and designers, we’ve spent many years trying to get the best ROI on our time, and we’ve discovered a few things along the way, one of the most cost-consequential being the flawed ways we go about tracking our time. Much has been written about the pros and cons of time tracking, but read on for our top 5 reasons why most time tracking methods don’t work, so you can procure one that does!

1. Time tracking solutions can be disruptive

Seasoned professionals, from designers, engineers, freelancers, or lawyers, work in a fluid way. Pausing or interrupting our flow is one of the deadly sins of productivity and highly unfavourable for staying in the zone. Traditional time-tracking methods require you to pause, break focus, and shift away from your current task. The slight pause is not the issue here, but rather the spiral of distraction that can follow. Too often have we taken a quick moment to track our time only to find ourselves 30 minutes later in an all-out best cats of YouTube marathon.

2. They are unnatural

Most of us do not work in these hour-long periods of time we are often expected to track our time in. Even while in the sacred and previously mentioned zone, we’re leapfrogging from task to task, email to skype, excel spreadsheet to google doc, content management system to point of sale system, you get the picture. By nature, us creative and analytical types are built for transitional thought and action while most time tracking methods are not.

3. They are inaccurate

You’re damned if you do, you’re damned if you don’t. If you track your time in real-time, you’re decreasing productivity and interrupting your flow, if you estimate at the end of the day, week, or month, you’re inaccurately doing so, leading to an enormous potential loss of wages for you or your company. I think we can all agree that accounting for one’s time is more challenging than you’d think. Are you sure you spent 2 hours per day on that given task last month? Was it not closer to 2.5 hours per day? If so that’s an additional 2.5 hours per week, 10 hours per month of billable hours you are missing out on.

4. They lead to poor resource allocation

Especially with particularly challenging, finicky, or demanding clients, there is a tendency to shy away from them. Ok, maybe that’s generous; there is a tendency to avoid them like the plague. But what if they are one of your most valuable clients and you don’t even know it? What if, dollar for dollar, based on the time and resources you’re putting in and how they are compensating you, they are one of your best clients? You may not even know without accurate time tracking data. With that knowledge, however, you can make the decision to invest even more time, personnel, and effort only to reap some seriously lucrative benefits.

5. There is no best practice alternative… until now

While accurate time-tracking is a very powerful tool to understand how you spend your time and to improve moving forward, many of us had already resigned ourselves to the disruptive, unnatural, and inaccurate current methods of time tracking, finding them intrusive yet necessary. That is why we’ve created the Timeular Tracker, to provide an alternative that is easy to use, doesn’t interrupt your workflow and provides you with accurate data.

Whether you’re an entrepreneur, artist, freelancer, or lawyer; work independently, as part of a team, or oversee an entire department, accurate time tracking is important, and we’ve made it a whole lot easier with the Tracker.

Life is busy. The modern-day balance includes a delicate dance between, work, family, friends, and hobbies. Here at Timeular, we value how that time is spent. Don’t you?

 This article was written by Timeular and first appeared on their blog.

#timetracking #timetrackingsolution #timemanagement #productivitytool #timeular