After the craze of tracking expenditures and calorie intake, there is a new obsession – one that of tracking time.
In a small pilot run in our company, we ran one such tool. The results were astonishing. A top management guy realized that he spends 2.5hrs on personal calls in office as opposed to the 0.5 he believed he was spending. Others realized that they spend 2-3 hours browsing the internet and a surprising 1 hour and more just pressing F9 on their outlook.
Time tracking is not new to those familiar with Toggl, Chrometa, Klok and more. The tools out in the market now allow an individual to monitor the time spent on each application. This records keystrokes and idle time with dynamic dashboards available. Not only does this help increase productivity, it helps a manager know how his team spends their time and if they can be better utilized.
The issue however, with letting your manager view the dashboard brings forward the issue of privacy. If an organization was to go ahead and install this on all systems used, employees might feel that this information may be used for measuring performance as opposed to being utilized for development. While debates continue, a CEO went ahead and published his dashboard on the company intranet pointing out his areas of improvements.
It may be a while before our company decides on what to do with the application but there is no doubt that like tracking calories and money spent; tracking time has its benefits.
Have you considered tracking your time yet?
Related reads:
http://www.fastcompany.com/3024249/10-time-tracking-apps-that-will-make-you-more-productive-in-2014http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/6-free-and-useful-desktop-based-time-tracking-software/http://blog.toggl.com/2011/06/nine-ideas-to-make-your-employees-track-time/http://business.answers.com/logistics/the-benefits-of-tracking-employee-time
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