Timeular - Efficient Time Tracking

What is Time Management

Whether you are a freelancer or working in a company, time is the most important resource that often seems to be lacking.

While we struggle to meet deadlines, work on improving our skills or have to attend another big meeting, it simply feels like there's not enough time to do all of that.

The answer to overcoming this feeling of being overwhelmed lies in proper time management. And the way to achieve that is to realize where our time actually goes.

That’s what time tracking is all about.

In this article, you will learn how efficient time management can boost your productivity and your health, and learn about the awesome tool our team’s being using to effectively and effortlessly track our activities - Timeular. You can get it here.

Let’s go!

Identify Bottlenecks

Time tracking comes with a surprisingly big list of benefits.

First of all, when you start measuring how much time things take you will be able identify which tasks eat up most of your work time. You might find possible bottlenecks - activities that stop you from completing projects on time. Are all of them worth the time you put into them? Maybe they can be delegated to someone else?

The amount of time you spend on your tasks is only the first step to efficient time management. If you log your time properly the context of the tasks performed should let you decide how you and your team can better manage your time.

Stay Focused

Also, know your limits. When projects are lining up and new responsibilities are coming up it’s very easy to get distracted. Trying to keep up with everything can easily backfire. That’s why it’s important not to abandon tasks.

Create a to-do list but stay focused on the task at hand. Keeping track of time makes it easier to concentrate. It also gives you important insights when you need to decide on the next task to tackle. If you know how much time you need to invest into a particular task or project, it can give you motivation to accomplish it faster. It also makes planning much easier.

Develop Healthy Habits

As much as productivity is important for your work, remember that it should correlate to your health.

Here’s my personal example.

One of many necessities of my work are frequent meetings - to discuss requirements with stakeholders, or to discuss next steps with other team members.

It probably sounds familiar to a lot of people.

That’s why I never really thought about how much time those meetings take until I’ve started tracking my activities. It turns out that I spent almost ⅓ of my overall work time attending team meetings!

This meant I was left with no more than ⅔ of my time to do the actual work. And with multiple clients this often meant overworking. And with overwork comes stress and health issues. So it didn’t take me a lot to realize I had cut off the time for meetings so I could focus on other stuff.

Most people don’t even realize the price we pay for feeling this continuous stress. A proper time management strategy can be a solution for this. But no such strategy can be developed unless we start keeping track of what we do and when.

Go Automations!

Since we’ve established that time management is important both to our work and health, let’s take a look at the tools that can help us with time tracking.

Fortunately, the time of manually filling out spreadsheets is long gone. With the rise of technology and automations we can now use one of the many time tracking tools available on the market.

With one click of a button those tools can monitor your activities.

If you’ve never used any of them you might be slightly overwhelmed by how many tools are out there.

There is software made strictly for time tracking such as Toogl, and there are complex management tools that offer time monitoring as part of their robust functionality, like Wrike.

They all have their pros and cons.

But there is one thing that connects them all, which was always a big issue for me. They all require your manual input to start tracking your activities. This means that you need to go to your app, click a button and provide some short description.

It doesn’t seem like a big issue at first. But if you have experience working with multiple clients or you are a kind of person that wears many hats in your company you might know that it’s not always easy to remember to go to that app and click that one button.

And the more tasks you have to do, the more confusing it gets to quickly log your time.

This has always been a thorn in my side. Until today.

Meet Timeular - a Unique Time Tracking Tool

Ok, maybe not exactly today, because I’ve been using Timeular for over a month now and couldn’t be happier.

It’s a unique time tracking device in the shape of an 8-sided dice. You assign a particular activity to each side and… flip the tracker when you start working on something. Connected via Bluetooth, it automatically starts tracking the task that is facing down.

Simple and very efficient.

It’s a great alternative to standard trackers and even though it’s designed to be a work-at-home product, it can very easily be used in your office.

Watch the video below, made by Bart, to see the unboxing of Timeular.
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How Timeular Works

There’s not really much to say about how Timeular works. And I’m writing it as a good thing. As I said before, this tool is built to be simple and efficient.

Each side of the 8-sided tracker represents an activity of your choice. You are free to define them however you want. You can categorize them by projects, tools or your clients. Whatever works best for you.

Timeular comes with stickers (106 of them), and a pen and eraser so you can customize the sides to easily know which side represents which activity. After configuring the tracker in the Timeular app, you just flip the tracker to the right side.

The Timeular tracker is easy to use and because it’s always close to you, sitting on your desk, you never forget to track your time. It truly is a game changer when it comes to efficient time tracking.

Want to try Timeular? Click here!

The Timeular App

The tracker is connected via Bluetooth to the Timeular app, which is available for most platforms (iOS, Android, Windows and Mac Os). That’s where you configure your activities and assign them to the tracker’s sides. The configuration is almost as effortless as using the tracker. You flip it to an unassigned side and pick one of the activities which you created beforehand.

To better manage your activities you can categorize them between spaces, e.g: you can create a work space to keep track of anything related to your job and create another space to store your private activities.

If you want to make your time tracking more accurate Timeular app lets you set up and use tags (# - for traditional hashtags and @ to tag people), which comes very handy when describing the activities after you’re done tracking them.

To watch the hands-on review from Bart go back to the top of the page.

Reporting

It’s worth noting that using tags really helps with reporting.

That’s because Timeluar gives you real-time reports about how you spend your time. You can easily check which activities eat up most of your time and which tags you use the most. All of this data is presented on colorful diagrams.

Also, Timeular sends you weekly summaries to your email inbox. They include statistics with key insights giving you a quick look into how you spent your last week.

They can really help you keep track of things. I often found myself adjusting my activities the next week after I got my report because of what I learned.

My only complaint is that the reports can only be exported to your standard file formats - .csv and .xlsx. It would be nice being able to present those reports to your clients the same way they are presented in the app.

Solution for Teams

One key feature of Timeular is that you can use this tool as a team. All spaces, activities and tags can be shared between team members if each one of them has their own Timeular tracker.

In the reporting tab, you can change the view to show the accumulated data from all teammates using Timeular.

This makes Timeular a good solution for small teams, who need an easy-to-use reporting tool.

Conclusion

What can be measured, can be improved.

Time tracking can boost your productivity, gauge how long things take and give critical insights into your working habits.

If you keep struggling with deadlines and feel like you could really benefit from time tracking, we highly recommend that you start as soon as possible. And we strongly encourage you to give Timeular a try!

Click here to give Timeular a go!

Bart Szkaradek