Time Tracking Software Reviews

I’ve been thinking about the next generation web design studio quite a bit lately. What makes a team efficient? How can small teams maximize efficiency?

Bob Parsons who runs Go Daddy has written about tracking and measuring important business numbers. I read this and said “yeah, I need to do that.”

One thing I learned early in my business career is that anything of significance that is measured and watched, improves.

Back before I started Parsons Technology I became impressed with something I read about John D. Rockefeller. In fact, I still think about it and use it to this very day. I learned that Mr. Rockefeller was one of the few people in his industry (perhaps the only one) who knew exactly how much it cost to extract, refine and deliver a barrel of oil. In fact, he was entirely aware of all his costs. Knowing this information (and acting on it) gave him a huge competitive advantage. He knew how much he could price a barrel of oil for and still turn a profit. He was always keenly aware of each area of revenue, cost and market share, and he worked on improving in every area. As a result, he did cost saving things like manufacture his own oil barrels, have his own cartage company, and on and on.

The first sentence is the most important. Read it if you skipped over it.

This all brings me to my point. I think it’s very important to track the numbers that make your business a success. I’ve tried to do this over the years and have tracked a large number but never to the extent I want (for numerous reasons, not that I didn’t try).

As I said, I’ve been thinking about the next generation web firm and wondered what numbers you track in your business or where you work? The obvious things like revenue and billable hours are obvious, the less obvious are things like average employee utilization across a period of time, or average timespan to develop a site… How does this affect the bottom line? Does it give you a competitive advantage? I’ve got loads of ideas about things that can be tracked. Putting systems in place to actually track them (consistently) is the next step.

I’m not perfectly organized. I’m probably a bad example of organization. But at work, I like to think I am organized.

1. Time Tracking: I track all of my time at work religiously. I know exactly what I was doing and when on any day this year (billable and non billable work). We currently use Complete Time Tracking Pro for time tracking, but are working on our own time tracking system called Minuteglass.

2. Calendar: I organize my days with Google Calendar. In our office, we have a “Tornado Deadlines” calendar so any time we promise a client something it’s added.

3. To-Do-Lists: We use Todoist for tracking our to do list. We have a separate category for every one of our customers and share it in our office. Everyone knows what items are due today and in the next two weeks.

4. Email: In Outlook, I flag emails that need to be responded to. Only after that is completed, added to our Todoist task list do I unflag it. Or when the email is responded to.

What other tools do you use for tracking your life? There are so many ways to track projects and time and money. We’re working on a few that we will be releasing as well.

The good news is that everyone in our office uses these same tools (team of 3 people). This makes collaborating that much easier!

Update: In January, 2011 we use Gmail a lot more, still use Todoist.com, and also use a number of tools across the Mac and PC platform.

Update 2: In August, 2013 my main tools are: Harvest (using the Mac app), Wunderlist for to-do list, Sparrow for email, and Google Calendar for my calendar. I also started using Evernote for keeping track of docs and client files, and use Dropbox for storing client projects.