Time Tracking & Productivity Blog
Thomas FuchsYou run a business, and your business runs on time. Whether your need to bill your customers, or knowing which projects use up precious...
“My overdue tasks are mounting up and overwhelming me. I don’t know where to start!”
Having a well-oiled, active todo app is a great thing. You’ve got your big projects outlined, your daily tasks scheduled, and you can add that request for “one more thing…” in a matter of seconds. In short: You know exactly what needs to be done, and have a plan for checking all the boxes. Unfortunately, sometimes life throws a wrench [...]
Thomas Cannon
5 Reasons Why Time Tracking is Hard
The old saying goes, “Time Tracking ain’t easy”. All you want is accurate and on-time data so you can plan your resources, bill your customers and find those pesky projects that just take longer than they should. Here’s the top five reasons why Time Tracking is so hard (and how we make it easier in Freckle!): You can’t [...]
Thomas Fuchs
Scheduled reports: automatically email reports to your team and clients!
At the end of the day, tracked time is only useful if you can easily run reports on it, especially over time. If it’s a hassle to get the data your business needs, you’re less likely to run reports regularly and the work piles up. Do you have a few reports in Freckle that you regularly run? Do you have managers who want very specific [...]
Thomas Cannon
Teams: Successful businesses are a team effort
At the end of the day, tracked time serves the purpose of making your business run more efficiently. You need to identify where time is spent by your team. Where time is used effectively. And where it isn’t. And what if you have lots of people using your Freckle account? Multiple office locations? Many internal departments? Many external [...]
Thomas Fuchs
3 Ways To Get Your Team To Track Time
You run a business, and your business runs on time. Whether your need to bill your customers, or knowing which projects use up precious resources—you rely on accurate and timely time tracking: who did what when, and for how long. In the minds of your team members time tracking probably is far down the list of what they think is important. [...]
Thomas Fuchs
How to ship software, the easy way
Do you think you have what it takes to ship software? I’ll let you in on a secret: it’s not easy and takes a lot of effort—but it’s all skills that you can learn. Here’s my checklist for getting software projects done, in a way that they actually ship and actually work well: To ship software, first learn how to design things for [...]
Thomas Fuchs
Stack Overflow is down. What now?
The Internet is awesome. Information is right at your fingertips. Always-available help from people all over the world is one of humanity’s dreams come true. I’m not sure if the philosophers of antiquity included copy and pasting of code snippets in this dream, but hey, it’s a fact of daily developer life. Copy and pasting is awesome, [...]
Thomas Fuchs
To #tag or not to #tag
The other day, one of our two amazing developers Thomas “Tagging It” Cannon wrote an advice email. As much as I wanted the email to be about men’s fashion (he’s a sharp dresser), alas it was a solid bit of guidance for an IT team to get the most out of Freckle. In his defence, the email was a lot more useful (at least [...]
Thomas Fuchs
Recurring Budgets! (also, cat sweaters)
Budgeting time is not the most exciting concept to discuss—unless it’s qualified by the statements “large sums dedicated to” and “for fulfilling dreams.” Unfortunately, we at Freckle can’t manifest a fairy ATM machine with a penchant for life coaching as your next client or ours for that matter. What [...]
Thomas Fuchs
Timesheet approval and locking entries
You have a team to manage. Maybe it’s only 3 or 4 people. Maybe you’re leading projects in three different departments and have 46 folks that should be logging time in Freckle every day. Regardless of crew size, you need everyone to log their time consistently. You also need to make sure that tags are appropriate for each part [...]
Thomas Fuchs