Productivity Tip 4 – Don't Cheat Your Time Tracking Software

Time tracking is not just for billing, in future productivity tips I'll talk about how you can use time tracking to increase your efficiency and take control over your time – but all that only works if the data in your time tracking tool is correct.

If you boss or client has direct access to your time tracking you are out of luck, when your pay (or reputation) is directly dependent on the information in your time tracking it's just too tempting to change the data, to modify the estimate just a bit so people won't see how wrong you were or to move a few minutes from a non-billable task to a billable one.

But the moment the data in your time tracking tool doesn't reflect reality you can no longer use it to improve, its useless data – not even worth recording.

The software I'm developing, yaTimer time logging software, is currently a stand-alone tool, designed to help freelancers, consultants, contractors and other individuals tracking their own time improve their efficiency, sometime in the future I'm going to release a networked version and I hope that yaTimer can still be valuable when the boss has access to the data.

posted @ Monday, November 26, 2007 3:27 PM

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