November 13th, 2008 by John Reeve

There are plenty of online time tracking tools to help small businesses keep a better record of billable time. It’s as simple as starting a timer and letting it run while you get things done. When the job is completed, apply the time. Run a few reports, generate an invoice, and collect your money. Then start the process all over again the next day.

After you’ve been tracking your time diligently for a few months or a few years you’ll have amassed a healthy amount of data — useful for evaluating past productivity and estimating future projects. At Pelago, we’ve found good time tracking practices to be an essential component to project management.

Incorporating time tracking into your day-to-day workflow will give any small business great quantitative insight into productivity. But what about the quality of that time tracked? Simple distractions like a phone call, an exclamation-pointed email, or a question from a co-worker can deter us from the task at hand. Before we know it, half our time has disappeared into an unrecoverable void.

Understanding the quality of the time we’ve tracked is still beyond the capabilities of any online tool, but perhaps that is where we’ll be headed next. It may not be necessary to analyze time tracking data in this way for business tasks like billing clients and paying freelancers. However, understanding the quality of the time spent can be extremely useful for optimizing business productivity.

Imagine being able to deduce that your web designer is most productive during the mornings, and that your developers crank out the most code in the evenings (yeah, I know, you probably don’t need a computer to tell you that developers stay up late). Qualitative time tracking data could help a project manager schedule tasks during the optimal hours for each resource. How cool would that be? Each industry has their next generation products in the works. Could this be ours?

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• Time Tracking: Weekly Timesheets vs. Daily Timers (2)
• Social Aspects of Group Time Tracking & Task Management (4)

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 13th, 2008 at 8:20 am and is filed under Intervals News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.