Monitoring Work Time
- By Jane Dawson
- Published 01/20/2011
- Tools and Resources
- Unrated
As an online entrepreneur, you spend an enormous amount of time online managing your business. You are not only working on your website but you are visiting social network pages to interact with clients, reading industry news, checking out new wholesalers, conducting keyword searches, evaluating competitor ads, updating your wallpaper, playing online games what? Naturally, you will occasionally be diverted by YouTube or CNN or ESPN but do you know how much time you actually spend in activities that may not be revenue producing for you during your workday? If you had like to know there is an application for that!
Several new software programs have entered the marketplace that will help you monitor and manage your time online. In general, these programs downloaded onto your computer track everything that you do and report back to you the amount of time spent by website visited.
Group sites according to function
Some programs allow you to groups websites according to function. For example, you can group your ecommerce websites as work sites, procrastination or diversion sites such as gaming sites or YouTube, family related sites such as the dentist website or the PTO website. This categorization gives you better insight into the way you spend your time. Of course, it does not help if you categorize Facebook, My Space and twitter as your social marketing sites but spend your time playing games and engaging in snowball fights and the like.
Time Limits
Sort of like having mom around again, many of these programs allow you to place time limits on the amount of time you spend on specific sites that you identify or prohibit use of those sites during specific parts of the day. Ouch! Most programs also have a
timer available that you can set so you can watch the time pile up as you flip through the movie reviews or the newest best sellers on Amazon.com.
Offline
At least one company offers a program that also operates offline so you can see how much time you are spending on desktop applications. This can be quite useful if you need to figure out how much time it is really taking to do your accounting or deal with business plan updates in your strategic software.
Goals and Reports
Most programs suggest that after you better understand your usage, you set goals for yourself that you track with the program. They track your time, compare time spent with goals set and generate management reports for you to review. There is nothing like cold, hard data to provide information that you may have been unwilling to admit to yourself otherwise.
Company Use
While individual usage may be free, most of these software companies hope to make their money on enterprise level solutions. Fees are typically charged on per employee/per month basis. Although you may feel that it is an undue invasion of space to track your employees web activity, it is perfectly reasonable and fair to understand how your employees are spending their time. This concept is not very different from the old time sheet that is recorded in fifteen minute increments for billing purposes except this one is done in an automated way and employees cannot easily crib the numbers.
One company offers two approaches at the enterprise level:
Management only Reports of activity are provided to management only as a monitoring tool
Enterprise wide Reports are available to all employees (or each employee can view his or her own reports) to act as learning and benchmarking tools.
To find examples of these programs, search on the phrase time management tools for web users.
Several new software programs have entered the marketplace that will help you monitor and manage your time online. In general, these programs downloaded onto your computer track everything that you do and report back to you the amount of time spent by website visited.
Group sites according to function
Some programs allow you to groups websites according to function. For example, you can group your ecommerce websites as work sites, procrastination or diversion sites such as gaming sites or YouTube, family related sites such as the dentist website or the PTO website. This categorization gives you better insight into the way you spend your time. Of course, it does not help if you categorize Facebook, My Space and twitter as your social marketing sites but spend your time playing games and engaging in snowball fights and the like.
Time Limits
Sort of like having mom around again, many of these programs allow you to place time limits on the amount of time you spend on specific sites that you identify or prohibit use of those sites during specific parts of the day. Ouch! Most programs also have a
Offline
At least one company offers a program that also operates offline so you can see how much time you are spending on desktop applications. This can be quite useful if you need to figure out how much time it is really taking to do your accounting or deal with business plan updates in your strategic software.
Goals and Reports
Most programs suggest that after you better understand your usage, you set goals for yourself that you track with the program. They track your time, compare time spent with goals set and generate management reports for you to review. There is nothing like cold, hard data to provide information that you may have been unwilling to admit to yourself otherwise.
Company Use
While individual usage may be free, most of these software companies hope to make their money on enterprise level solutions. Fees are typically charged on per employee/per month basis. Although you may feel that it is an undue invasion of space to track your employees web activity, it is perfectly reasonable and fair to understand how your employees are spending their time. This concept is not very different from the old time sheet that is recorded in fifteen minute increments for billing purposes except this one is done in an automated way and employees cannot easily crib the numbers.
One company offers two approaches at the enterprise level:
Management only Reports of activity are provided to management only as a monitoring tool
Enterprise wide Reports are available to all employees (or each employee can view his or her own reports) to act as learning and benchmarking tools.
To find examples of these programs, search on the phrase time management tools for web users.
Jane Dawson
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