One of our customers recently clued us in on a unique time tracking method they devised using multiple timers and simple arithmetic. The challenge they faced was finding out how much time they weren’t tracking. Most of us do take breaks or get distracted throughout our workday, but we don’t track that time. Here is a breakdown for their clever and simple workaround.

1. Start a general time at the start of your day. This timer will be running the whole day, so give it a descriptive name to remind you why it’s there. Something like “baseline.”
2. Go about your workday in a normal fashion, starting and stopping timers, applying time to tasks and projects, accumulating time on your timesheet.
3. At the end of your day, stop the general timer you created in step 1. Compare that total to the daily total on your timesheet. The difference will show you how much time was lost.

Now that you know how much time you’ve wasted, it’s up to you to figure out how to fix the leak the next day. Let us know if you have any tips.

It is an unavoidable fact that anyone working for a small business, or freelancing, will be required to wear multiple hats. You will be responsible for many aspects of the day-to-day workflow outside your own core competency. When a business is comprised solely of a small team or individual, things like time tracking, task management, and project management become shared responsibilities. This becomes especially true for smaller businesses who can not afford, or do not require, the luxury of a dedicated project manager.

Intervals, our web-based project management tool, gives you freedom from the responsibilities of running a small business by letting someone else manage the distractions.

At our web development & design agency, Pelago, this is true of every one in our office. Our project manager must sometimes trudge through pages of HTML to update a web site, or open a terminal into the inner directories of our Linux servers to troubleshoot a failed backup drive. Our developers are expected to track their time accurately, and to interact with clients to resolve smaller issues in an efficient manner. And myself, I’m a designer by training, a developer by trade, and have had to acquire a few project management and system administrator skills to keep our team balanced.

The peripheral responsibilities demanded from us can sometimes be overwhelming, and we’ll look up from our computers to realize it is already 5pm and we haven’t yet had a chance to touch that design comp or write that bit of code. In other words, our day was robbed from us, consumed by the business of running a business.

Our small band of web-savvy mercenaries has struggled with this issue for all of the nine years we’ve been together as a small business. And every freelancer we’ve encountered has grappled with the issue as well. Is there such a thing as freedom from project management? Can we get a break from all of the peripheral duties that take up our time?

There is no bottled elixir for professionals in our same situation, but we have had great success with adapting our workflow to Intervals, our web-based project management tool. If your day-to-day struggles sound at all similar to ours, you may find Intervals to be a good fit. In fact, adapting any web-based productivity tool into your workflow is the first step. It’s what allowed me, an introverted developer, to manage projects. And it helped our designers, developers, and freelancers all track their time more accurately.

Our goal with a product like Intervals is to help ease the pain of running a small business. We want for our hosted software to take on your burdens and lighten your workload, so that you, too, can focus on the business of your business. Whether you are a designer, developer, writer, system administrator, or engineer, let Intervals handle the miscellaneous responsibilities that keep you from getting things done. Find freedom from the responsibilities of running a small business, and let Intervals manage your distractions.

Today, at our Pelago offices, our Internet went offline for eleven hours. From 5am this morning until just a few moments ago, we were in the dark, completely cut off from the rest of the digital world. Instead of descending upon the local coffee shop for free wi-fi, we took a step back and re-evaluated our workload for the day.

Our main problem was that we couldn’t get to Intervals, our online project management tool. To remedy this, we had to think outside the coax that carries our digital lifeblood in and out of these four walls. We had to find a way to track our time and manage our tasks without the benefit of an online tool. It was rough, but we pulled it off.

To start with, we had to track all of our time on paper timesheets. We printed out a few of our old paper timesheets (the ones we used to fill out way back in the day), and started filling them out. Easy enough. Now what about our task lists?

Fortunately, our task management tool, Intervals, emails us notifications whenever a task is created or updated. We simply searched through recent emails and found enough to-dos to keep us busy for at least another day or two.

Although it really sucked not being able to get online, the biggest hassle was changing up our workflow to get things done in a manner we weren’t used to. It’s amazing how efficient we can be when all of our systems are online. Sometimes we take our pervasive online project management system for granted. Not today.

We’ve just update Intervals with improved email notifications. Now, when you create or update a task, the notification email will include your profile photo alongside the summary or comment. We’ve also made some visual improvements to the emails to make them easier to scan. Login to your Intervals account to see this task management enhancement in action.

When it comes to task management, there is a myriad of web-based software options to choose from to help you get organized and get things done. Which one you choose depends largely on your needs. There are three different levels of task management to consider. Each one is geared to handle different volumes of task tackling, and some may or may not address additional workflow needs. We’ve broken down workflow needs into three categories to help you decide which online task manager is right for you.

Basic Task Management

For people who have basic needs and simply need to cross items off a list, an online to-do list is an ideal solution. Basic to-do list managers are often used for personal task lists, but can also be useful for freelancers with lesser needs. The main requirement is an interactive list that can be sorted by priority or date, with the ability to add details to each task. Not much more is required for getting things done from day to day. A good place to start for simple task management is Remember the Milk.

Intermediate Task Management

An enhanced task management service will bundle a few other features into the mix, to give your tasks a greater context, but without distracting you too much from the tasks themselves. Sometimes called a glorified task list, Basecamp is a good example. Tasks may be tied to collaborative and scheduling features like chat and milestones to help smaller teams stay communication with one another and to reign in the abundance of tasks that can be created on any creative project. Services, like Basecamp, will equate task management with project management, but the comparison falls short the minute you realize that managing projects, and a small business, requires more.

Advanced Task Management

Small businesses will usually require task management coupled with a few other features to help manage their workflow. A task management tool becomes advanced when these other productivity tools are integrated with it to form a comprehensive tool that addresses many of the aspects of running a small business. Integrated features can include time tracking, invoicing, collaboration, contact management, and reporting. Tasks are managed in the context of running your business, playing an important role in getting things done. Task management tools in this arena will address the lifecycle of a task — entering the task, tracking the history of a task, tracking time spent on a task, and billing for work completed. For an example of an advanced task management, check out our own web-based tool, Intervals.