Instating the aid of an app or software tool to help track your time as you work might sound like a dreaded, big brother Orwellian scheme. However, keeping tabs on how hard you are working is not necessarily the invasive procedure it sounds. There are a number of ways in which this can help you manage your personal time tremendously, while also ensuring that you are producing the kind of results necessary to succeed. The following are a few important points to remember, in case you are a diehard skeptic.
1. Become a Better Planner
Despite every worker’s good intentions, it’s easy to underestimate - or overestimate - how long it will take you to plan out a project. This makes it difficult to properly assess your time, efficiency, the resources required, and so on. An easy way to fix this would be by utilizing a timesheet app, which provides an essential outlook on invaluable data that will help you make sound decisions and layout important strategies. Without keeping track of the time, you won’t really know how to shift your schedule.
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2. Designate Your Free Time
Tracking how you work not only ensures you are highly productive, it is also a way for you to cap how long you work on a particular project so that your work does not overtake your life. This is especially helpful if you are a freelancer or working from home - without a fixed office, it’s easy for the hours to bleed into each other, and you might feel as though you should be chained to your laptop all day, which is very unhealthy.
3. Enhance Productivity
By keeping track of how many hours you put into your job, you are ensuring that you are not interrupted by tiny, nonessential tasks that end up eating up too much of your time. You will be focusing all your energy on the important stuff, and meeting critical deadlines straight away.
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4. Efficient Allotment of Wages
Tracking your time not only allows you to manage your own productivity but also your entire team’s and ensuring that people are paid exactly for the work they do rather than the opposite. This isn’t to instill a distrust of employees, but rather, if you are a small independent business, you are deeply aware of the importance of paying people well but also according to the work completed. Otherwise, you may be sinking considerable chunks of money into a system that does not work as well as it may appear.
5. Resource Management
The only way to accurately gauge whether you need to throw more manpower to help support you on a project, and thus more money, is to track how long it takes you and/or your team to finish a task. Every element of a business - especially its human resources - needs to be treated as a rare resource in order to ensure that projects are completed on time while maintaining the overall long-term financial sustainability of operations. Tracking time will only help.
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Just like bullet journaling and other forms of task management, time tracking not only helps you accomplish the goals you set out for yourself - in addition to those set out by your employer - it can take the form of self-care. Essentially, you are ensuring that you don’t burn the midnight oil while remaining an excellent worker, achieving that sense of balance for which we are all searching.
