Project management, overall, isn’t going as well as it should for the majority of teams and managers – and time tracking for projects and tasks may be a big reason why. Fewer than 30% of all projects are finished by their deadline. And an overwhelming majority are over budget and or fail all together. Increasing project productivity by even a small increment can make a huge difference in a company’s long term success and savings. The majority of project management is simply a matter of instilling better organization, task management, and time management habits. Getting into a habit of time tracking can completely change the way your team works together.
Try these methods for time tracking for projects and task management:
Use time tracking for projects to better delegate work:
It’s easier to schedule, delegate, and follow up on tasks you assign to your team when there is an idea of how long tasks are taking. Using a task timer like the one in a task management platform like Hibox is a great way to be more precise about planning and scheduling leading up to deadlines. Overwhelming employees and not knowing how much time tasks are taking can throw off whatever schedule you’ve come up with in the beginning to meet your deadline. Getting into the habit of tracking how long certain tasks take as your team moves through a project can be very helpful in optimizing scheduling and delegating. When management has a more specific idea of how long tasks take, you can avoid overwhelming employees and more accurately predicting complete dates to avoid a complete mess as your team’s deadline approaches.
Use task time tracking for projects to improve productivity and motivate:
There is something motivating and procrastination-eliminating about having your tasks timed. That is why productivity and time management methods like the Pomodoro method are so popular. Knowing that we have a timer on helps us keep focused rather than feeling like we have all the time in the world. It’s an incredibly simple psychological trick to boost productivity and keep you and your team focused. Hibox has an individual time tracker you can have your team use to keep track of where their time goes. There is also a little competitive element to Hibox’s task time tracking and task management. Employees can see in order of best to least, who is working at a fast rate in terms of getting their tasks done. Having a competitive edge to your team can help motivate and push everyone to perform at a better speed.
Tracking time around deadlines as a team:
Leading up to deadlines, it’s important everyone has a clear view of all the moving parts and their role in a project. Miscommunications and unexpected delays are the biggest killers of successful projects. Avoid them by tracking tasks together as a team in a calendar like Hibox’s project calendar. You can set deadlines and delegate tasks leading up to them to your team in a central place where everyone has access. You can use subtasks to further breakdown the big tasks that make up your project. It’s a great way to put tasks in chronological order for everyone so they know what needs to get done in order to move forward in an efficient and productive way. Waiting on other tasks to get done because of poor and undetailed timeline planning can quickly eat up time on projects.
As important as tracking time is for scheduling and productivity, one of the biggest factors that throws off projects is communication. When communication is not seamless and is not easy to use with task management, working with your team is much harder than it needs to be. To really boost productivity and make sure your projects are successful, use an all-in-one project management platform like Hibox. In Hibox, teams have group chat, task management, time tracking, file sharing, and group video chat all within the same platform. Hibox eliminates the main pain points of collaboration to make team projects simple. Try Hibox with your team for free today.
