You know the old saying “Time flies when you’re having fun?”.
Turns out, time also flies if you’re not in control of your day. This tends to happen if you can’t manage your daily tasks and lack some time management skills that would make you able to save a lot of time.
Keeping track of time is generally a good way to keep productive all day. If you track time for the tasks you work on each day you will briefly improve your project planning and you will be an expert in avoiding time-wasting activities.
Thanks to Timeneye we will show you how to check your work time and see if you allocate the right amount of time to your tasks and if, in the end, you can achieve your goals and objectives.
But before we put our hands in the dough and start tracking time, let us see if you have a fruitful approach to time and are interested in developing some time management skills.
From the Eisenhower Matrix to the time tracking software, Timeneye. Here is how to prioritise tasks and check the time spent on each of them.
Dwight D. Eisenhower is considered the precursor of time management.
He was twice President of the United States and a five-star general during World War II, he created NASA, he ended the Korean War, and made Alaska and Hawaii part of the union.
These are not even all of the activities that he took care of during his life and, there is no need to highlight that he was a very productive and highly focused person.
Eisenhower pointed out the difference between urgent and important saying that what is urgent is not important and what is important is not urgent.
And it is from this Eisenhower’s thought that was born the so-called “Eisenhower’s matrix.”
The Eisenhower Matrix
Urgent Not Urgent Important Do it: Under this list go all of those activities that already meet a deadline and consequences if not taken or done. Handing in the last project before summer holidays; Picking up the suit before wedding’s day; Buying a present to your partner’s birthday.
Plan it: Tasks and activities that do not meet a deadline yet but they move you closer to your goals and objectives. They are both important but it often occurs that they get postponed since they do not meet a deadline. Long courses able to boost your career; Starting a new sport able to help your posture; Networking events.
Not Important Delegate it: Those activities that have to be done but they do not require any of your peculiar capabilities. Washing your car; Answering some emails; Scheduling.
Delete it: Enjoyable but distractive activities that make you feel fine in the moment and guilty afterwards. They are important for a balanced and fun life but only if done with moderation. Watching TV or binge-watching Netflix; Eating junk food; Going shopping.
The Eisenhower Matrix is important because it differentiates activities in order of priority as long-term and short-term ones.
To develop time management skills, it is important to understand what needs our attention or does not need it (DELEGATE IT), what needs immediate prioritization to avoid any trouble (DO IT), what might be considered superfluous (DELETE IT), and, also, what should be kept in mind to meet our goals (PLAN IT).
To sum up we need to ask ourselves two main questions:
- Is this activity important to me?
- Is this activity urgent for me?
After having replied to these questions we can feel ready to start a task and, while working on it, keep track of the time it requires us.
A time tracker is useful to prevent time-wasting tasks and improve our project planning to achieve our goals and objectives.
And it is here that time management meets technology developing time managing tools able to avoid the mess of spreadsheets that become impossible to read, inaccurate guesstimates, and a lot of manual labor made of filling cells and tables.
So the best way to track time spent a daily task is to rely on a time tracking software such as Timeneye!
Timeneye and how to track time on different tasks
Timeneye let users track time effectively, but it integrates with several popular tasks and to-do list software. Timeneye isn’t just a timesheet, but it adds several visual reporting tools to see where the time went and helps you to better project planning and develop your time management skills.
It is easy to see exactly where your time went and, in the end, evaluate if that were an important/urgent activity that needed your time or that could wait.
But let us start seeing the advantages that a time tracking tool like Timeneye can offer you to make time tracking a daily working habit of yours.
Let us set it up!
Sign up, open your project, and start tracking time with Timeneye
First, get started by signing up for the time your tracking software account (in Timeneye you can do it from the website). Then, what you have to do is create your first project.
When you track time, be accurate as much as you can so you will not forget the “email-answering time” or the numerous meetings requested by your client.
Tracking your whole time on a project is a perfect way to bill properly your client because in this way you are aware of the billable vs non-billable hours you have worked on.
As you set your projects in Timeneye, you will also break them down into phases.
Every content marketing activity will require you some time, as shown in this Timeneye project view.
And now you can track your time, making sure you assign the right amount of time to the correct project and phase you’re working on.
Connect Timeneye and Todo List Apps
If at work you are already using to-do lists and a project management software, you can just add Timeneye’s time tracker to them.
In this way, you won’t have to switch between multiple tabs and you will focus on the task, just right where you are.
Timeneye also tracks the time you spent on each task thanks to native connections and to its handy Timeneye Browser extension.
- To track time for Asana’s tasks and Basecamp to-dos use a combination of the browser widgets for starting timers. You can also just leave a comment on the task/todo with the time spent on the project;
- To track time for Clickup and Microsoft Planner sync your ClickUp project and Microsoft Planner plan with Timeneye. Then use the Timeneye Browser widget to track time;
- To track time in Todoist, Taskade, Microsoft To-Do, and Trello, use the combination of the Timeneye Browser widgets and use the widget button to track time.
The integrations will link the time you track to the specific task you’re working on.
How to know what the most time-wasting tasks are
A time audit will show you how you have allocated your time across your projects and it makes you know what project, task or client has been taking most of your time.
Timeneye is a time tracking tool that automatically saves data on the software each time you track your time.
In this way you can take advantage of the data and get time insights; it’s waaay more efficient than extracting data from endless spreadsheet rows, or worse, relying on your memory and guess on whose activities you have worked on during the last month.
For example, in Timeneye’s personal report section, you can check how you have been using the time across all the projects.
How to know how much money you should spend on repetitive tasks?
You can use a calendar to get organized and track your repetitive tasks.
You can create recurring events for the task you do often, and then sync your calendar with Timeneye directly from your Outlook Calendar and Google Calendar Integration.
Using a calendar for productivity is not only useful to remember tasks and appointments, but also for time blocking or deep work.
If the calendar event is synced in Timeneye, all you need to do is to look for it in the Timeneye dashboard and use the suggestion to track time.
We might now say that time management is something in between our organization and ability to recognize urgent and important activities and tricks and tools able to make our life easier to avoid distractions and interruptions, manual labor, or silly, repetitive tasks.
First of all, we would need to focus on our time management skills and see how able we are to prioritize, delegate and delete non-important activities.
Once we are confident and we know what to do and when to do it, we can rely on time tracking software, such as Timeneye, to enrich our time management skills and check how much time a task requires us.
In this way it is up to us to decide if we want to put more energy into improving our work performance or, in case it is not worth it, it would be better to just leave it and not taking similar commitments in the future.
Time management plus time tracking tools not only make us save a lot of time but they also make our business flourish.
Give it a try and sign up for a free 30-day Timeneye trial!
