Hours makes time tracking something everyone should do
Time is our most valuable resource and it is constantly slipping away from us. Similarly, the most valuable corporate resource is their employee’s time. Yet both personally and corporately we are generally clueless about where all that time goes and how effective it is.
Up to now, time tracking itself has been cumbersome and time-wasting. Some companies given up on time tracking altogether because employees either spend too much time trying to re-trace their steps or end up making stuff up, leaving you with inaccurate reports. It’s at least a billion dollar a day problem.
When you want to get out of debt, you track your spending. When you want to lose weight, you track your consumption and expenditure of calories. When you want to stop frittering away your most valuable and easy-to-waste resource — your time — you need to track it.
I was a dreadful time tracker myself so I understand deeply why people hate tracking their time. I am convinced time tracking itself isn’t the problem — in fact, now that I track every minute of my time, I am much more productive because I am conscious about where my time is going. No, the problem is that time tracking tools have not been designed to be really good at tracking time as you go.
That changes today with the launch of Hours.
Hours is the first time tracking service that makes it really easy to track time as you go and account for every hour of your time.
Watch this quick overview to see how it works:
Here are a few of the reasons why Hours makes time tracking something ever person and team can and should do:
One-tap time tracking
Unlike most time trackers, Hours keeps a running list of the things you typically work on so you don’t have to go through multiple steps to say what you are working on now — just tap and you are done. Switching tasks is just as easy — just tap the new task.
Accessible from your wrist, pocket, or desk
Here are just a few places you can start, stop, and switch timers with Hours:
- The Hours iPhone app
- Apple Watch app
- iPhone lock screen via the notification center widget
- iPhone home screen via the new 3D Touch shortcut
- An Android device via the Hours mobile web app
- Your desktop via the Hours web app
Being able to start a timer on your desktop and stop it from your wrist on your way out of the room makes building the habit of tracking time as you go that much easier. (Side note: people love this. For example, on a given day 30–50% of our active users use the app on the Apple Watch!)
The timeline
Easily account for every hour with the visual timeline. Seeing your time visually helps you to identify mistakes and fix them by just dragging the start or end time. Add time to the timeline by simply clicking on it.
Smart reminders
Hours on iOS and Apple Watch uses your work day and other factors to nag you at just the right times so that you don’t forget to start and stop your timers. This nagging eventually trains you to track your time habitually.
Manage the flow of clients, project, and tasks
One of the biggest pains of team time tracking is that admins want to be the ones to set up new projects and tasks to make sure everything is orderly, but if they don’t set up a new project right away, team members temporarily have no way to track their time.
Hours makes everyone happy by allowing any team member to create a project and immediately log time to it and allowing the admin to approve the project later or merge it into the correct project set up by the admin. Problem solved.
Snappy, visual reporting
Creating a great reporting interface requires making some assumptions. For example, instead of assuming you are trying to generate a completely unique report every time, we assume you generally like to see the same stuff for the same period (whether that is 15 days, a month, or something completely unique) and default to that report automatically, giving you tabs to quickly select different date ranges for that report. You can filter and adjust from there however you please and see your changes instantly reflected in the report.
We also believe that visualizing data can yield big insights — insights that are difficult to glean from a table of numbers — so we include ample visuals in our reports to let you see instantly where all of your time went (versus trying to analyze the raw numbers).
The mini-timelines for each day an employee works let you see, for example, if your employees are getting to a state of flow or if their attention is being split between 10 different tasks in a day.
Share reports
You can export your reports to a CSV file for import into a spreadsheet or another system but you can also share your visual reports, in all their glory, via a web link, just like sharing a link to your files in Dropbox.
Fun to use
We believe business software doesn’t have to be boring. In fact, if your employees enjoy using an app, they are much more likely to stay engaged and track their time accurately, which is good for business! Slack proved that business users are human too — we all prefer enjoyable interfaces that have a personality over boring, dry ones. From the on-boarding copy to subtle animations throughout the app, we are always looking for opportunities to make you grin. We are pretty stoked that some of the user reviews for our app use words like “fun” and “addicting” to describe Hours.
Other features
- One account, multiple teams: The number of people working for multiple companies at once is increasing astronomically, but time tracking solutions haven’t evolved accordingly. We realized that this trend is so huge that we designed the new Hours platform to allow users to track time for multiple teams in a unified interface.
- Rounding: Hours supports rounding time to keep your data simple and organized — this is great for lawyers and others who always round their time to the nearest 6 minutes, 15 minutes, or what have you.
- Snapping: Even if you don’t use rounding, it is nice to deal with time in neat chunks. If you set snapping to 15 minutes, for example, when you drag time on the timeline, it will always snap to the nearest 15 minutes so that your time can be tidy and easy to deal with.
- Color coding: Because your time is color coded, you can quickly identify the timer you want to start and easily glean insights through visualizations of your time.
- Time flexibility: use 12-hour or 24-hour time, hours and minutes or decimals, or change the start of the week from Sunday to Monday or something.
- Live sync: When you start or stop your timer on any device, the timer starts or stops on every device where you are running Hours.
We think Hours is going to change the way you and your business think about time.
