Time logging, Time tracking and Time Management

1) What you have done, how have you spent your time?

How do you organize or spend your personal time, does not matter, it is up to you.  But the time you spend during your work, when you are in Project, in the context of a company, it is important. There is someone else payment for every minute of your allocation.

That is the reason the time logging may appear some bureaucratic activity: registering your to-dos, just for some formalism.

But it is not, it assists the whole management chain.

2) Importance of time planning

The time log helps the whole group, and specially the management board to know how the time is expended. It may help in understanding how your cost center is being utilized. There is the reason time planning is so important, it indicates in which tasks your hours are going to be booked. Booking an hour, means, in the end of a period, especially in the end of the month, your working hours are going to be part of an invoice, and it will be sent to some customer paying it. Now imagine you are on the customer side, how these hours were utilized becomes a very important topic. Especially in projects in which the hourly cost of an individual may be very expensive, costing hundreds or even a thousand dollars (or whatever your currency is).

3) Importance of time logging

It’s based on time logging that a project can have transparency over its costs. It is based on the registering of how much effort you and the team have spent on a task, that the project can be properly monitored, and if it is the case even, controlled. Normally tasks have their duration, and costs are estimated based on the estimated effort necessary to do that. The effort is the amount of planned worked hours. So, if a task was estimated to be done in 6 hours and it has taken 9 hours, these extra hours may be out of the budget, and the project may fail. It is very important for this kind of situation to be identified as early as possible to avoid the scalation of problems.

4) How Project Management Tools may assist with that.

A good project management tool may assist in the whole-time management, it means, it accesses in the planning, the logging, and in the monitoring. Of course, it needs to be easy to utilize, once time logging can be not very nice to carry out, when we facilitate that, we have more chances to have a precise and up to date data input by the how team.