Do you know exactly how you’re using your time? What part of your project is keeping you busier?

Today I’m going to show you how to use one of the most important features in Timeneye – the project Phases– for more accurate time tracking and reporting.

What are the Phases in Timeneye?

Phases are a fundamental part of projects in Timeneye. To track time in Timeneye, it’s compulsory to create projects to allocate that time to. And phases are a core part of projects, as all Timeneye projects must have at least a phase.

This means that when you track the time you can select the projects and the phase for which you are tracking:

How phases keep your time and projects on track

Using phases will help you be more accurate in your time tracking, and benefit the workflow as a whole:

• You will know exactly where your time is going, and you’ll be able to assign your time entries more accurately;
• Phases help you track every aspect of a project from start to finish;
• They help you stick to the overall budget of the projects by allocating the right amount of time;
• Big, complex projects can be broken down using the phases, making them more manageable and less scary.

How to create and manage phases in Timeneye

When you create your first project, you’ll be able to set the phases by simply starting to type them in the field and pressing ‘Enter’. The system recognizes the phases you’ve already used and starts suggesting them. Easy as that!

Projects don’t always go as planned, so it’s possible to edit, add, or remove phases in the Project edit mode.

An interesting option is to add an hourly budget to the phases.

If you work on hourly budgets, you may know already how crucial it is to stick to the planned hours. Exceeding the budget will lead all sorts of headaches (and very upset clients).

By allocating part of the budget a phase, you’ll make sure that every aspect of the project is given the time it deserves.

For example: if a client has commissioned a website, from design to development, along with creating and uploading the content of the web pages, you’ll want to make sure you don’t spend, let’s say, too much time on copywriting and then run out of hours for developing and debugging the website.

Adding a budget to each phase we’ll help you just with that. To see how the budgets are progressing, head to the project’ Status view.

To keep track of all the phases you’ve created, and to edit them in bulk, there’s a dedicated Phases panel inside the Projects section.

What type of phases should you use?

That really depends on how you organize your work and the type of projects that you work on.

To get back to the website example above, the phases can be the activities you need to perform for your client: “Development”, “Design”, “Content”, etc.

In other cases like, like developing a new app, the phases can be the versions of the app: 1.0, 1.0, 2.0, and so on.

Phases can reflect the process behind the scenes.  Here’s an example from how I work: for my project “Timeneye blog”, I have created phases like “Brainstorming”, “Researching”, “Writing”, and “Reviewing”.

I don’t have a “client” who’s commissioned me anything. Still, the phases help me understand how the process for creating a blog post is going from start to finish, and what aspect takes most of my time.

Bonus tip: did you know that you can assign phases to phase categories and track them across projects?

How To Use Phase Categories In Timeneye (And Why You Should)

Now the word to you: what types of phases did you create in Timeneye? Let us know in the comments!