4 good reasons for tracking your time

Tracking your time, what’s that all about? Before we concern ourselves with four reasons for tracking your time, we should first clarify the term:

In Duden’s dictionary, time tracking is defined thus: ‘Tracking of specific periods of time, especially working time’. It’s probably clear to anyone what ‘tracking working time’ means: you track the time you spend at work, starting with ‘arrival’ and stopping with ‘departure’. But what exactly does ‘tracking of specific periods of time’ mean?

In companies, there is of course a purely legal requirement to track working time, but frequently and in parallel with this, one also has to track the time worked on specific projects or tasks or for specific clients. ‘Specific periods of time’ could also refer to activities carried out within a company or completely privately.

So much then for the term ‘time tracking’; but does absolutely everyone have to track their time? Are there perhaps exceptions, where there is no point in tracking time? We’ve tried to answer these and other questions below.

1. Tracking Time = Getting Paid

We’ve all been there: you’re working on a task and suddenly the phone rings. A customer has come up with a suggestion for improvement on a draft recently submitted to him. And since the customer has made a lot of notes, the call lasts half an hour. Afterwards you have to start by carefully noting down all the points raised, so that it takes another 10 or 15 minutes before you get back to your original task. You carry on working, with maybe another two interruptions in the course of the day. Then in the evening you go home and wonder: what exactly did I do today? Often the answer will be: um, no idea, I just can’t remember, there was so much going on.

And so it happens that these interruptions, that are simply part and parcel of the working routine, don’t get tracked and cannot then be billed to the customer.

2. Transparency

In any company there is usually a great variety of areas of responsibility. The engineer working in the field probably wonders what the office-based technician does all day, and the woman in the office cannot imagine what the man on the shop floor is doing all day long. If, in addition to working time, the time actually devoted to tasks, customers etc is tracked, work is made much more transparent. It’s not a matter of ‘only’ working nine hours: in those 9 hours in the office, Maria Huber has prepared quotations for 3 customers, spoken to customers 5 times on the phone, drawn up a new budget plan for the marketing department, and spent 2 hours preparing the accounts for June.

Not only is transparent tracking of work necessary within a company, but time should also be made transparent to the customer. Here is an example: our company has been given a contract by a customer, Maier & Co. The project for the customer is planned with a fix price. We are renovating their premises, with one month allowed for the roof. Suddenly the month is over but the roof isn’t yet finished. We overspent the planned time because the customer had additional requests and the renovation of the roof delayed. If time is constantly being tracked directly, we can show now the customer why there was a delay for the roof project and discuss additional costs with him.

3. Time Management for tasks

You so often find yourself thinking: I’ll just do this task as well, it’s a bit on the side, no big deal. But it turns out that you’ve underestimated this ‘little’ task and spent longer on it than you ever meant to. If you track the time spent on tasks, you always have an overview of the actual time spent and can therefore get much better at estimating the time needed for certain tasks in the future.

Having time to accomplish something is also an important measure for quality of work and life. If you never have enough time for anything, whether at work or in private, you are subject to constant stress.

4. Optimizing work

If an employee is frequently interrupted while working, he gets to the end of the day having worked productively for a shorter time at a stretch. Let’s suppose you entrust a particular task to your employee Mr Huber. To start with, he’ll need at least 15 minutes to familiarize himself with this task. But if he can only spend 20 minutes on it, because he gets interrupted by a phone call from a customer, it only leaves 5 minutes for him to actually work productively on that task. With professional time tracking you can determine these interruptions exactly and thus optimize work (workflow, workplace, …) for individual employees.

A final tip…

Professional time tracking is also a significant measure of quality in a firm. Both companies and their customers benefit from it: the customer knows exactly what he is paying for, and the company gets paid for the services it provides. The customer should therefore be made aware of the use of professional time tracking as a sign of quality.

It is definitely worth tracking your time. As well as the 4 reasons given here there are probably 100 more good reasons. As a provider of a time tracking solution we are of course in favor of time tracking, but what about you? What are your reasons for thinking it makes sense to track your time or it’s pointless? We look forward to hearing your comments.