Time tracking software – how can it boost your efficiency?

How often do you fail to meet your deadline? Are you wondering what to do to work more effectively? One of the ways is monitoring every minute you spend at work and using this information to improve your time management skills. Check out how time tracking software can help you with that!

What is a time tracking software?

Time tracking software, as the name suggests, tracks every minute you spend on a particular activity. Thanks to the ability to generate a lot of customized reports, they illustrate how much time it takes you to complete particular tasks. It is the key to understand how you plan your workday because it can help you analyze how you manage your time and thus how to improve your daily plan.

Advantages of using time tracking software

Today time tracking softwares is becoming more and more popular, especially among vast companies.

According to Gartner's "The Future of Employee Monitoring" study, more than half of large organizations admit to using "non-traditional" monitoring techniques to gain insight into how their employees spend their time during working hours.

Although our article is focused mainly on monitoring working time for personal use, it is worth knowing why these tools are so popular. It's not just about controlling whether the employees are actually doing their job.

The main advantages mentioned by entrepreneurs:

• increasing employees' productivity,
• increasing transparency in corporate processes,
• the possibility of more realistic task planning,
• improving the quality of project management,
• creating healthy competition among employees,
• increasing the company's income.

Who should use such solutions?

As we already know, the time tracking tools are primarily bought by entrepreneurs who want to have an overview of what their employees are doing. However, it is not the only group that is able to achieve many benefits, like improved productivity or increased income, thanks to such solutions. 

Time tracking tools may be useful for:

• graphic designers,
• software developers, 
• marketing specialists, 
• students,
• office workers who want to increase their productivity.

How can time tracking software improve your efficiency?

1. It helps to focus on completing the task on time

Being aware of how much time you have already spent on a particular task, helps you to stay motivated to complete it on time. Therefore, time tracking tools help you to avoid any distractions like browsing social media, watching funny movies, or chatting with friends. As you know, doing something else will significantly extend the duration of finishing the assignment. Try to focus only on your work.

2. It teaches to focus on one task

Time tracking software makes you focus more on one thing to make a real assessment of the time you've spent on it. It is a crucial advantage because taking unplanned breaks while doing tasks are associated with longer execution times.

As research performed by scientists from the University of California shows, every time we take our attention away from a task, we need as much as 23 minutes and 15 seconds to get back into it.

Moreover, focusing on one activity can reduce the number of errors in the job, as they are often caused by multitasking. 

3. It gives the motivation to work

Among the benefits of time tracking tools we mentioned "creating healthy competition among employees". But do you know what we mean by it? So, for example, some employees notice that completing a particular task takes them more time than their teammates. Then, they feel more motivated to improve their performance so that they doesn’t fall behind their colleagues.

However, this benefit is not only for people working in a team. After all, it is in our nature to continually self-improve and try to be better and better. The reports showing what we spend most of our time on, motivate us to do our tasks better and faster.

4. It helps to communicate with customers

If you are a freelancer who is billed by the hour, you need to carefully monitor all your work activities for a particular client. Then you will have clear and reliable arguments about why the particular assignment took you so long and what specific steps you had to take to complete it.

5. It helps to appraise your work

When you receive payment for a specific assignment, it is sometimes difficult to estimate with which client you have the highest hourly rate. Sometimes the time spent on negotiations or corrections is much longer than completing the task itself.

It is worth monitoring all activities related to cooperation with a particular company. Time tracking software allows you to more accurately calculate which cooperation is the most beneficial for you. It enables you to work less for the same or even more money.

6. It helps to set realistic deadlines

Time tracking makes you more aware of how much time you spend on specific tasks. This way you are able to more efficiently estimate the deadline for the execution of contracts.  It can be beneficial, especially for freelancers. Having a lot of clients, they often have difficulties in deciding whether they should take on even more jobs.

Summary – tools to boost you efficiency

Looking for a time tracking software? We invite you to test our AI-based app called ClockTrace. It will monitor your activity in documents, programs, or websites by itself. Therefore, you do not have to specify which activity you are working on at a particular moment. The software runs in the background and does it all on its own. Such tools allow you to focus completely on your work.