Mastering Time: The Benefits of Time Tracking for Remote Workers

Remote work has revolutionised the way we approach productivity and work-life balance. However, one critical aspect often overlooked by remote workers is time tracking. Whether you’re an employee seeking to demonstrate your efficiency or a freelancer aiming to optimise your billable hours, tracking your time can unlock powerful insights into how you work, helping you achieve more with less stress.

To make it even easier, we’ve partnered with Funkytime, a brilliant time-tracking tool available for our community to use free for six months. If you’re ready to take control of your time grab it here now!

Why Time Tracking Matters for Employees

For employees working remotely, time tracking is more than just a productivity booster—it’s a tool for transparency, self-organisation, and accountability. Your status as an offsite worker may need to be justified and defended, and at the very least you need to know where your time is going. In knowledge-work generally we frequently have only the haziest idea of how long particular tasks should or do take, or where the majority of our focus and attention is getting deployed.

Prove Your Efficiency

Time tracking lets you demonstrate your value to your employer. By logging hours and tasks, you can show exactly where your time goes, providing evidence of your contribution to projects and overall productivity. This transparency builds trust with managers, especially in remote settings where face-to-face supervision is limited.

It will help you to plan future priorities, and identify areas which may lack results, or simply not be worthwhile in balance. It will also be useful in identifying trends which reflect your personal patterns and tendencies - for example, you may find focused written tasks take you less time to complete effectively late in the afternoon, compared to mid-morning. You can use this insight to structure your day and support your own inclinations, such as blocking off focused work time during the hours when you are clearly most likely to benefit from head-down work rather than meetings and interruptions.

Highlight Your Self-Organisation Skills

Managers often worry that remote work leads to procrastination and disorganisation - especially managers who may themselves be unfamiliar with distributed working, never mind managing people they can’t see. A detailed time log allows you to demonstrate how well you plan your day, balance tasks, and meet deadlines.

This proactive approach can lead to greater autonomy and even career growth opportunities. Perhaps your manager would benefit from scaling this monitoring across the team, or trying it out for themselves! Knowledge work is so infrequently tracked for any kind of efficiency. We would always recommend that performance is monitored for our output and effectiveness rather than activity, but when someone else (e.g. a manager) is specifying what the activity should be, then they need to know what that is costing the organisation/team in time resources.

Defend Your Choices

If you’re ever questioned about the time spent on specific tasks, having a log enables you to respond confidently. Whether it’s an unexpected delay or a challenging project, your time tracking records can offer clarity and defend your decisions with hard data.

Keep your green dot alive… zzzz

Or perhaps you’re so productive that your manager is inclined to take advantage, and pile additional responsibilities on to your plate without mercy, precisely because you ARE the kind of person who gets things done and never lets them down. You might worry that any pushback will be seen as laziness, lack of ambition, or lack of competence - but if you have some consistent time tracking data to hand you’ll be able to respond with factual analysis, and explain that you would love to tackle Project X, but can they please work with you to review your present commitments and their workload in order to decide what to delegate or reprioritise?

Being proactive about time tracking also helps you avoid any suggestion of monitoring from the employer side, a practice which is generally indicative of a lack of trust, an inability to measure results, and a negative and adversarial relationship. Especially for those working from home, any kind of monitoring is particularly intrusive and obnoxious. It also creates perverse incentives and work arounds, like the emergence of hardware and software solutions to ‘fake’ remote activity - fuelling the deeply unhelpful trope of remote workers slacking off, stealing time, or running 3 jobs at once…

Freelancers: Make Every Hour Count!

Freelancers face unique challenges when it comes to balancing productivity and profitability. Time tracking provides the insights needed to tackle both effectively.

Track Billable Hours with Precision

For hourly-based freelancers, accurate billing is essential. Time tracking ensures you’re compensated fairly for the work you do, reducing the risk of undercharging. Highly paid experts may even track billable minutes, and having a clear audit trail may well be required to defend invoicing and outputs, and provide insights to your client about how their investment breaks down across cost centres: Funkytime allows you to categorise time by client or project, making invoicing effortless for you, and analysis straightforward for them.

Identify Profitable Work

Many freelancers, myself included, do the vast majority billable work by milestone or output, and indeed, this is the model I coach my community to work towards for most knowledge-based careers. You should never be penalised for efficiencies and scaling up, and it’s not usually anyone else’s business how long it takes you to do things!

However, it is still extremely valuable for YOU to know how long it takes to do things that you get paid for, and even if you don’t routinely track time for billing purposes, it’s well worth doing so periodically.

Thanks to our partnership with Funkytime, you can use it for 6 months completely free - so why not decide to track time for a two or four-week period of typical work?

All of us who do a range of different things for different clients probably have some intuition about whether they’re a ‘good’ client or gig, depending on how you feel about doing the work, and whether it seems worthwhile. However I find that it’s very easy to let emotions influence these perceptions. Of course that’s totally fine, and one of the best things about being a solopreneur is the right to choose. If you have a client you love but they don’t have big budgets, that’s your call.

Or you might be really enjoying a new line of work, but because it’s new it’s more challenging, and takes you longer to do than things already in your zone of excellence. Our intrinsic perception of passing time is influenced by so many different factors, and being deeply absorbed in learning can immerse you in productive flow for hours - or drive you to distraction with frustration. Is it worth it? You need data!

By analysing time logs, you can pinpoint which projects bring the most value. If certain tasks consume more time than they’re worth, you’ll have the data to adjust your focus and prioritise higher-value activities.

Cost Future Projects More Accurately

Ever underestimated the time a project would take?

If you’re pitching or quoting for work based on a project/output cost, you naturally have a sense in mind of how long it’s likely to take you to get it done. Even if the output itself has a natural ceiling to what the market might bear, you need to weigh that up against how long will probably take you, to identify whether or not to bother pitching it in the first place.

Time tracking allows you to analyse past projects and refine your estimates, helping you quote confidently and avoid taking on work that’s not worth your time.

Collaborate And Project Manage

Of course, whatever the work, we’re rarely doing it in a vacuum. Our activities are usually part of a bigger picture, and the work of others might be contingent on your activities and milestones, and vice versa.

Both employees and freelancers working on project-based assignments can use time tracking to stay on top of deadlines, improve task prioritisation, and minimise procrastination. As a freelancer, you can’t afford to be the bottleneck on a big internal project, just because they outsourced that bit to someone not within the regular team. So being able to show your working time could be an essential part of the project management process, for everyone involved.

Time tracking keeps you accountable by offering real-time data on how you’re spending your day. Knowing that every minute counts can motivate you to stay focused and complete tasks without unnecessary delays.

Even if your work is not interdependent with that of others, it’s highly likely you’re juggling more than one client, more than one deadline, and more than one activity simultaneously, or with overlapping expectations. It’s easy to underestimate how long some tasks take. A time tracking tool can help you allocate time more effectively, ensuring that no task eats into hours meant for other priorities.

Try Funkytime for Free Today

The benefits of time tracking are clear, but finding the right tool can make all the difference. That’s where Funkytime comes in—a user-friendly solution designed for remote workers to manage their time effortlessly. From detailed reports to intuitive categorisation, Funkytime makes time tracking a breeze.

An as a valued member of our community, you can now enjoy six months of Funkytime for free. Don’t miss this opportunity to supercharge your productivity and transform how you work. Start your free trial here! No catch, use it in full, and they’ll give you a clear heads up before the billing (which is great value anyway) kicks in after the very generous free trial.