Wudatime

Today we want to talk about productivity and how to measure when a project is taking too much time to get done.

Being a project manager in a company, or a freelance developer or designer it’s the same: we all need to know when work needs to be done, and if the time spent doing it was ok or what is more important, profitable. Or we maybe spent too much time doing it? How can we know that, if we don’t measure it?!

And that’s how the research on project management, timesheets and time tracking software starts. Let’s say it, we all used an excel timesheet, or added approximate hours in the calendar, or even were forced to add past dedication from memory in a hideous application. But that’s not the way to really know how much time we spent in a project.

As a current user of time tracking applications, I do think they are quite useful if and only if:
you don’t loose time tracking time: this means dead easy software, very quick and nice if possible (that helps a lot).

It allows you to plan and organize tasks: you can only measure productivity of a project if you first organize it. Ie: adding to-do lists, estimating the time to complete a task. So rationalise.

You can play a task just in time. Of course it is useful to add time entries manually if you couldn’t do it while doing the thing, but it is much accurate to use a player to know the exact amount of time you spent doing something. Ask Mr. Bolt if seconds do count!

Have to see red lights! No, I don’t mean like in Amsterdam, I mean like critical information: if a project is taking more time to complete than originally planned, turn the red light on and do something about it.

While doing this process for the second time, you can tune time estimations (then also quotes accordingly) and beat your marks adding efficiency to your projects.