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How to Track and Make the most of Time Usage in Your Teams

Time Tracking for Business and How to Optimize Your Usage

Time is an invaluable resource in life and business. And though everyone has 24 hours at their disposal, how you choose to use yours is what makes you either successful or leaves you running around in circles trying to figure out what’s up.

Time tracking for business is particularly crucial for companies that sell services to customers. If you do your math right, how much profit you rake in will depend on how effectively your team-players use their time.

Do not rush to extend your office hours or onboard more staff before you ensure your current team is making 100% use of the time you have.

So how can one make the most of their time in business? We will discuss some steps below. But first, how can we convince and prompt co-workers to monitor their time.

  Encouraging Your Team to Monitor Their Time 

Be transparent. Honesty and keeping everyone on the same page will ensure your staff track their office time successfully. Make sure everyone is aware of their role, how to execute it, and who to report to after they’ve done due diligence.

Track your (own) time. Your team members will get more conscious of their time when they realize their leader is doing the same. You can’t preach water while drinking wine and expect your flock to follow your teachings.

Make clear the goal and benefits of tracking time. Explain that your objective is not to be the tyrant manager, but to boost up team productivity. Be specific about the benefits of tracking time. You can make reasonable promises like better time management could improve per month bonuses or reduce office hours.

Mention that monitoring time is not a hassle. Explain that by “tracking time,” you do not mean everything is going to change. Give each member an individual responsibility to take note of their weaknesses and make changes where need be.

 

How to Optimize Time Utilization 

  List and Categorize Team Roles 

It can be daunting to organize all your business processes into a day’s timetable of roles. But there’s an easy way to go around it when looking to do time tracking for business.

• Jot down all roles that recur in your business
• Allow your staff to assess and revise  the list
• Come up with categories for those activities
• Begin monitoring time based on defined categories

Follow these steps, and you will end up with consistent task categories – that include a list of roles – and the timelines to execute them.

  Why Categorize Activities? 

Listing your tasks in categories is a small step that allows you to see a bigger picture. You can’t track your Return on Investment accurately if you can’t tell how much which activities are eating up most of your time and resources per day, week, or month.

Listing activities in groups will also ensure you focus only on what can boost up your profits?

Because analyzing time utilization is not an easy task– classifying duties will reduce the workload for you while ensuring you get more accurate results.

Failure to note down the types of activities ahead of your time-tracking efforts will create confusion because everyone will have their own interpretation. Prepare early and update all team members on how to classify their tasks.

  Monitor Your Time with Time Tracking tools for Business

After you have grouped all tasks, you want to ensure you can track the success of your time optimization efforts.

 That means you must find a way to monitor time; thank goodness you have a wide range of time tracking tools for business to depend on.

And while you’ll be stuck between options while shopping for the right tool to use, an easy way to decide is to go through their features. What properties will be of utmost importance to your time tracking activities? We recommend you look for the following:

• Task/duties
• Time taken per task
• time limits and job progress
• A team calendar
• Customizable activity types
• A timer

Again, because time tracking for business is a passive internal project, you don’t want to buy highly sophisticated tech that will ruin your budget and make you spend even more resources on getting your team up to speed.

So if the same software you use for project management has time tracking capabilities, you can rely on it because teams work better in a centralized system.

A centralized platform also allows you to collect data in one system— rather than depending on multiple tools – making it easier to gather the insights you need.

Final Words

Correctly utilizing the office hours you have can be all you need to do to improve your monthly profits. Remember time tracking for business only lead to results if done across all teams.