Why Time Tracking is So Hard

The old saying goes, “Time Tracking ain’t easy”. All you want is accurate and on-time data so you can plan your resources, bill your customers and find those pesky projects that just take longer than they should.

But instead you’re fighting with your software, eventually not using anymore and then blaming yourself for being “undisciplined”. Well, it’s not you, it’s your software.

You can’t just automate it

Sure, there’s apps that track which other apps you have open on your computer, and maybe even phone calls — but there’s a lot of work that’s done that happens away from keyboard. Meetings, conversations at the water cooler, or simply having a great idea in the shower. How do you track that? The best way to track time is to manually do it — humans know better than machines what they’re working on. But it has to be easy to do, if it becomes a chore, you end up with bad data.

Dependency hell

Who wants to configure 7 things after doing a 3 minute phone call? That’s right, no one.

When your software requires that you create a client, create a project, create a sub-project and create tasks before you can even track your time you’re bound to just not do it.

Why wouldn’t your software anticipate this and let you log time ad-hoc without any formal requirements? And let you do the details (like an hourly rate for a specific client) later?

“I’ll do it later”

People often log their time perhaps once a week on Friday afternoon, when they’re with one foot out of the office already. Or worse, just quickly log the time for last week on Monday morning.

Time Tracking software should be aware how actual human beings work and help you achieve better quality by providing ways to make time tracking easier, for example by actively reaching out to you when it looks like you forgot to track your time.

Work just doesn’t stop at the office door

Even if you’re disciplined about separating work and private life, we’re all just human beings. Have an idea during your morning shower? Discovered the perfect solution for your client during a weekend stroll? Or you have to switch between projects and need time to get into each project without being productive right away (ask any programmer!).

Your software should know that you’re human. For this reason, in many industries, traditionally time is rounded up to, e.g. quarter hours for billing. This gives a more realistic picture of how much time you actually spend—and minimizes overhead by not making you log every 10-second shower thought.

Business software is terrible

Most business software is like a visit to the DMV. Everything is grey and beige, you need to fill out confusing forms and you have to wait forever for anything.

There’s actually a lot of research on human-computer interactions that, not surprisingly, found that friendly applications that treat the user well (for example with forms that are less intimidating, cheerful color scheme, fast load times, etc.) yield better data quality.

Why? Simply because people don’t feel awful using the apps.

Software really doesn’t have to hurt—it can be actually helpful to get stuff done. But that involves a bit more than just throwing a few forms on a web page and brewing up a buzzword backend soup. It requires research and understanding the problem & knowing how humans behave.

Want time tracking that does all this? Freckle’s foremost design goal is to be cheerful. Give it whirl today.