Why to Track Hours in a Project Management

If you don’t think time tracking is important, remember that Albert Einstein, Nikola Tesla, and any other successful scientist or entrepreneur had or have had the same number of hours a day as you. Meaning that, with proper time management, you can achieve many great things and become much more successful. Project management time tracking is an absolute necessity if you want to excel and create a more productive atmosphere. So, here’s why time tracking is so important in project management and how you can track it.

Use project management software

In order to track time efficiently, you can do what any other modern project manager does these days, use project tracking software, with an inbuilt time tracking tool. These can help you with task distribution and they can help you monitor just how long it takes for project competition. Generally, these tools can be quite different and a lot of them are specially tailored to meet the demands of a specific line of work. Some project tracking software that anyone can use are:

Toggle – It allows anyone to sign-up and track how much time a worker spend on a particular project; it’s very easy to use.

ProProfs Project – Also, very useful and simple to pick up. It can be great as a time tracking tool and for generating reports for clients. It also allows you to easily rearrange deadlines in order to save time, and it’s a really nice project tracking software solution overall.

yaTimer – If you need an online time tracking tool that constantly reminds your employees to work, then this is a time tracking tool for you. There is a big clock that sits on your desktop and constantly reminds your teammates that time is of the essence.

Now, let us move on to the direct benefits of time tracking tools, in order to see just how helpful they really are.

Optimize your workflow and eliminate energy drainers

In order to boost productivity, you need have a clear overview of how your time is distributed on a daily basis. There are a lot of distractions and energy drainers that consume our time, like social networks for example. Once you know just how much time you spend on these distractions, you will be more motivated. When you see just how much more you can achieve on a daily basis, you’ll be more determined to fully focus your efforts on being productive. With more accurate estimation, organizing your workflow will be a piece of cake, and maintaining a productive atmosphere will be far easier.

It helps you make more accurate estimation

A project manager is truly successful when he or she is able to create accurate time estimates for the project. This also helps client management teams when negotiation with clients about deadlines, and it helps managers distribute the workload evenly. You cannot do this adequately without a good project tracking software solution.

You can use status reports to find out the approximate time need for a certain project type. Once you have this type of data at your disposal, organizing projects in the future will be far easier, communication with clients will be much smoother, and you’ll eliminate the risk of overburdening your employees. Additionally, it will help you eliminate the chance of scope creep, and failing to deliver something on time, thereby harming your reputation, and disrobing a current and well established workflow.

It helps you create more accurate pricing system

Time is money, right? And, if you know exactly how much your time is worth, you’ll have a more accurate pricing system. With efficient time tracking tools, you can know which types of projects are the most cost-efficient, and aim for those projects, because they have the best time investment to payment ratio. Moreover, you’ll eliminate the possibility of underpricing your services, or overcharging your client, because a bad review will always present a problem.

This is really helpful in the long run, because you’ll be able to get more clients and more positive reviews, and you’ll mitigate the chance of actually losing money by getting involved in the project that you cannot complete in an estimated time frame.

It can be a good motivator from time to time

Lastly, if you track time and your employees can see the timer, it may inspire a competitive atmosphere that is quite helpful in this case. They can compete with each other to see who will finish the task faster, and maybe even track high scores, and try to beat them in the future. Moreover, your employees might not compete with one another, but opt to compete with themselves.

They can track time for one task, and then try to outperform that time score. Plus, when you use time tracking tools, your workers can have a clear overview of their work history. If they can see how well they perform and how much improvement there has been, this will serve as powerful positive reinforcement, because numbers speak for themselves. Of course, this will not always be the case, and it won’t last forever, but it will give you a productivity spike for some time, which is never a bad thing.  

As you can see, there are clear benefits of time tracking and project tracking tools. Every project manager should strive to be better at his job, and one thing that reflects the quality of his or her work is how productive other workers are. If you want to increase productivity, as well as job satisfaction, time tracking and good organization are definitely the way you to go.

Remember to pick a tool that will correspond with your business model, and remember to use the metrics and statistics wisely. Once your workflow is fully optimized, you can move on to tackle different issues and work on improving your team.

About the author

David Miller is a researcher who has several years of experience in the field of teaching, project management and training. He is associated with prestigious brands and many leading organizations for his expertise in project management. Currently, he is pursuing research in effectiveness of project management software and is also a contributing author with ProProfs.

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