Guest Article
Keeping track of hours on project teams is a challenge that hits every business. It is hard to measure progress with multiple projects going on, especially when the things get busy, to-do lists never end and you as the business owner are pulled in too many directions. If you and your team feel overwhelmed with daily work, the problem could be time management. How can you master such situations? Track your hours daily.
So how do you improve your time-management practices to ensure you spend your hours on the right things? There is a great need to work smarter. You can optimize your business through the better use of time. Start with tracking your time. In its annual Wasting Time at Work Survey, Salary.com reported that 89 percent of professionals waste time at work each day.
Time tracking is important no matter the position in the company. It is a way to understand how everyone spends time. It lets you analyze the time spent on all daily activities. With the help of time tracking software it will be easier to study the biggest time suckers. Here are a few reasons why you should consider tracking hours in your business:
Stay productive
Many employees do not like the idea of tracking time of their work. They find it something negative that will judge their performance. But as managers you must be clear with everyone that time tracking is the best way to find any distractions that might be decreasing the productivity of the team. Keeping track of your time will also help you find out where your hours are really going. You will be surprised to see how the productivity of your day returns to peak.
It keeps teams accountable
Time tracking for a long time has been a smart business move. When the employees feel more accountable at work, it leads to a feeling of greater responsibility for their work. When polled, 91% of people stated that accountability is one of the most important things they would like to see in the workplace. When time is tracked, employees become more aware of their role in the project. It makes everyone inspired to not to waste any hours on the timesheet, ensuring that the projects stay on track.
You will learn how you spend your time
There’s no way to know how you spend your time unless you are actively tracking it. You might be spending more hours than you even realize on things that are not very important. We have a lots of minutes every dayㅡ 1,000 minutes to cover everything we love to do. When you track your time diligently, you will make every minute more meaningful and at the end of the day feel like you have had enough time for everything important.
Transparency in project teams
Being transparent with project teams will lead to better performance. Transparency builds trust between employees. With a time tracker, you can record every minute you or your team spend on every task. It ensures your business project manager will know what it has accomplished and keep proper records of the performance of each team member.
Manage project scope creep
Project scope refers to the project boundaries, defining the work that will be done during the project lifecycle. If a project have no defined boundaries, it can fall victim to scope creep. So, a project manager needs to avoid the possibility of scope creep to deliver projects before deadlines and on budget. Time tracking gives a better understanding of time requirements to set more rigid deadlines.
Effective project management
Time tracking is all about proactively planning how you will spend your time. You must have a clear visibility of ongoing projects, to evaluate who is available for the next project or daily tasks. Time is invariably an important criteria for managing business capacity.
Better work-life balance
The feeling of work-life imbalance and being time-strapped is continuously dominating our lives as business owners. Therefore, we need to consciously understand the decisions we make to manage our time. Once you start tracking your time, you will be having more free time or more balanced time for family, friends, and work. It allows you to do more things that you actually love.
Time tracking can be the difference for your business to keep employees happy, energetic, and productive. It will give you enough space to complete projects in a timely manner without a whole bunch of stress and confusion.
About the author
Vartika Kashyap is the Marketing Manager at ProofHub and has been one of the LinkedIn Top Voices in 2017. She likes to write about productivity, team building, work culture, leadership, entrepreneurship among others and contributing to a better workplace is what makes her click.
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