Have you tried tracking time for yourself or your team? Have you ever tried to use software to track time in your workplace?

If you’ve answered YES to either of these questions, it’s more than likely that you’re fully aware of how problematic time tracking can be.  Most options (with or without time tracking software) rely on user input, and more importantly, an honest account of how work time has been spent.

Forcing staff to complete time sheets or report time spent on particular tasks will never work with any degree of accuracy.  Here’s why;

1. Real time tracking is not the standard

Popular web based software tools that companies use for tracking time include Basecamp, Harvest, Freshbooks, Wrike (… and there are dozens of others). They all have one thing in common; they rely on the user to estimate from memory how much time they worked on an item. This guesswork is not likely to be accurate as the activities are not tracked in real time.

Some of these software solutions do offer “real time” tracking (html windows, desktop software and even iPhone apps). However the real time tracking is not the standard way of using the application and it’s all too easy for staff members to resort to estimating how long they spent on an item.

Relying on people to correctly “guess” how long they worked on each item is the most important reason why time tracking reports are vastly inaccurate.

Find out more

Over the past few weeks we have been working on a reporting feature that shows you the type of applications used, as well as web sites visited during the week. Application usage is categorized to show the sort of applications that have been used (instead of time spent for each individual application).

Here is an example of what time usage report will look like:

This new report will be sent to managers for themselves containing data for everyone on their team, it will also be sent by default to all non-managers (without team data).

This is a great addition to Time Doctor reporting features as it allows you to zero in on exactly how your team has been spending their time (based on application and website usage), instead of just their reported tasks and priorities.

We decided to only include web sites visited for over 10 minutes in a 1 week period to reduce the amount of data for managers -  we wanted to make sure that we are helping you focus on the big picture instead of getting bogged down in too many details.

We hope you find this report useful and please send any feedback you have. I’m sure the report will continue to improve as we receive feedback over the next few weeks.

In just under an hour, Time Doctor will have tracked 100,000 productive working hours for over 30 companies and around 100 individual users. To put this into perspective, that’s around 26,000 hours of wasted or poor time use that has been negated (at least that’s what the research would suggest).

If you’re a business owner who hasn’t tried our software, and the majority of your staff are using computers – you should be asking yourself why your team isn’t using Time Doctor?

As an employer, you have the right to know that your staff aren’t cyber-slacking on the job. Apart from tracking productive time, Time Doctor will also save you time every day – reports are collated and delivered automatically and you can see what tasks each team member has been working on, and how long it took in one simple daily email report.

(There are many other productivity features that are too numerous to list here. Take a look at our product tour for more information about how this software can save your business time and money).

100,000 hours of tracked time represents a significant milestone for Time Doctor as we move toward an official release  (in the first half of next year). At the moment we are concentrating on some fine tuning before we start rolling out some new features including Freshbooks integration, an edit time feature, time usage reports and client / project tracking.

Please keep the suggestions coming!