The Quintessential Need To Track My Hours

Every professional must be able to account for every minute spent at work, excluding the free time, lunch hour and scheduled breaks. Every manager or supervisor must assess productivity not solely measuring the output but also the time needed to accomplish the predetermined objective. Every minute of work is paid for by a company and it sometimes also billed to a client. Hence, making the most of every minute and ensuring that there is no lost time is at the crux of an efficient modus operandi. This reality demands an answer to the question ‘how do I track my hours with a reliable solution that isn’t an unnecessary chore or an additional task?’

Ask: How Can I Track My Hours to Avert Lost Time

No sincere professional willingly wastes time. No dedicated manager or supervisor intends to miss any such wastage or loss of time, either by commission or by omission. Loss of time simply happens. There are times when efficiencies dip, most professionals have multiple tasks assigned to them, there is always a bit of handholding and fellowship involved which can be disruptive for the task one is currently working on, there can be technical issues plaguing the systems and external causes of distraction or disruption. The external distractions or disruptions could be meetings, conference calls or video chats, emails, pressing matters requiring urgent response, troubleshooting a larger problem or anything that may be relevant in a given project or at a particular workplace.

There is often nothing that can help any individual, be it a professional or a manager, to know exactly how much time has been lost owing to one or several of the aforementioned reasons. It would help the professional and the manager, the senior executives or owners of the company and also the clients, if there is a state of the art solution to the question ‘how to track my hours.’ The lost time can then be addressed. Steps can be taken to reduce this loss of time or to completely avert it. There will still be instances when any professional will have to tend to something other than the project she or he is billing for, but the extent to which one may lose time during the work hours can certainly be checked.

Ask: How Can I Track My Hours to Assess the Challenges of a Project

Some projects are easy, some are difficult and some are daunting challenges. Easy projects are usually completed quickly. Difficult ones take a while and daunting ones may take a really long time. Assessing a project solely from the perspective of its service level agreement will not help every company, manager or professional to have the best idea of how everything will pan out. A service level agreement is not idealistic in nature. It does factor in realistic scenarios but there is often a bit of wishful thinking in every such legal document that tends to play down the severity of problems or the scope of uncertainties. Daunting projects or complex tasks can sometimes spring up some rather unpleasant and complicated surprises. These will compel a professional or the entire team working on the project to spend more time on the problem. This quest for the solution often goes unaddressed and the focus remains on how the project deliverables are being delayed.

Managers or supervisors can use time tracking software to know when the going gets tough and the tough gets going (answering the question ‘how to track my hours’). This allows the senior executives to understand the gravity of the problems and accordingly judge the complexity of the project. Not only would the team leaders be able to assess the severity of the challenges of a project, the time reporting software will also help the company to know how much additional time is being spent on every problem and by extension on a particular project. This paves the way for appropriate billing. The detailed assessments of different projects will also help managers and supervisors to understand how similar projects must be pegged in the future.

Answer: How To Track My Hours is a Quintessential Need

Time is the most important asset and every professional must be able to make the optimum use of available time. By averting lost time, by quantifying time with the task done and actually knowing the end results of every minute at the workplace, a company can attain impeccable efficiency, the futile endeavors that bear no result can be avoided and larger or more complicated problems can be resolved. All it takes is a simple software add-in for the Outlook Calendar that will automatically track your hours and generate reports. No one has to indulge in any additional chore or take up any extra task. The add-in works on its own seamlessly. Since Outlook is already in use at most offices, there is no need to get all the staff trained or accustomed to use any new software, application or calendar either.

So now you have the answer to ‘how to track my hours.’