Work Timer Systems: Why Is it Worth Practicing Them Nowadays?

Time is money and rightly so! It is considered to be a common business practice to use such a system as work timer that allows employees to know how much hours they spend at their work and how their team is effective.

Today we will not save time and try to see into the matter what is the main purpose of work timers, consider their types and determine real advantages of their constant use. We would also like to share with you our professional rating with the most popular and demand work timer tools for your company or your particular work team.

Work timer: what is the essence of such system?

Let’s make a certain excursus into the history of this issue: actually, the first free work timer system was spotted in the 19th century and presented itself as a certain written control of an employee’s coming and going from the work.

After a time, technical progress has contributed to the development of this system, and now we may know a work timer in different forms. For example, at least every person could see the cards for entering the office in order to track the time of arrival of the employee to work, or there are programs that count the time spent on work. In other words, there are a lot of ways to working hours monitoring now and each of them helps employees to plan the work more properly.

The main goal of a work timer is the enabling of a clear picture of every particular employee’s activity during the working day. Thereby, managers can track the real effectiveness of the entire teamwork, and for each employee it is a good chance to feel the personal productivity and to be a part of the effective team.

Furthermore, work timers have the following positive aspects for all the workers:

• it becomes simple to see what exactly takes time during the working day – analysis of hours spent on certain tasks, team meetings, breaks, brainstorming sessions, etc.;
• a better understanding of personal time management and adjustment of the timing of the execution of current or planned tasks – the extension or abridgement of terms in accordance with the real working experience;
• more efficiency from work and its subsequent great benefit from work on the hours spent – for the most part this advantage concerns the principle of working with hourly pay (for example, outsource cooperation with T&M model).

Types of work timers & their practical realization

It may sound quite ironic but people do not grudge the time for the invention of new ways of time tracking. Anyway, there are two central types of work timers from which we will build on the study of this issue:

Type 1 – Manual work timers

This type refers to primitive methods of controlling and counting the time spent on work. Such work timer systems can exist in the form of daily time records for each of the items in the personal to-do list and further regular (daily or weekly) reports for the manager, where there is a list of completed tasks with fixed time spent on their execution.

Usually a manual work timer is used in many different works but it may be more relevant for some strategic organizations, factories or other companies where the internal order implies mandatory fixing the time of the start and end of work. Also it is worth noting that manual work timers can look not only as the writing of certain data on a letter or in an electronic document, but also as the specific programs that are started and stopped timers manually. It is convenient for those workers who prefer to control everything by their own.

Type 2 – Automatic work timers

This type of work timers is modern programs that produce more accurate calculations of the time spent on work. Such work timers monitor the entire activity automatically on the Internet and on the desktop, taking into account the days of the week and the specified working hours (working schedule). Thus, the result of the work of this work timer system is not only the number of hours spent on work, but also the analysis of an employee’s personal activity for the whole day with a disaggregation by tasks. The obvious advantage of these work timers is its wide and useful functionality and the absence of the need to start or stop the timer by hand – the system will do it itself.

Automatic work timers are actively used in software development, especially on project works, where financial relationships are based on paying only for hours spent on work (Time & Material cooperation model). It helps specialists to understand better which tasks may take a little bit more or less time for their execution.

The most effective work timer tools

It is true that in order to have the exact calculation of working hours it is critical to choose one of reliable automatic work timers for that purpose. And fortunately, the modern market of such a software is quite huge, and there are plenty to choose from.

We have formed a certain rating that contains three most functional and convenient tools that will become real helpers in the work.

1. Timing

Even this application has such a plain name, it is a very versatile tool for time tracking and counting. The program provides different possibilities for monitoring the whole activity and the time spent on particular tasks during the working day. The tool has a very pleasant design and so-called friendly usability, so it is very comfortable to use it everyday.

2. Timely

This work timer software is not just an operating tool – it is a really good assistant for the work, indeed! Here you can count spent working hours, make up and send work reports to managers, change your workload, distributing hours among team members. This program is an excellent way for the practice of various types of work schedules, so that everyone is able to choose the most optimal mode of operation for themselves.

3. Be Focused

This work timer tool is supposed to be one of the most convenient ways for simple automatic time tracking. It allows employees to check their personal working activity in different current tasks and to create detailed daily reports. One more good nuance: this work timer is available for Iphone and Ipad devices what makes it more appreciated among iOS developers.

Conclusion

As we mentioned at the beginning of our article, time is the key factor for any kind of work. We spend days, weeks, and total years in different companies, and it is always important to know what exactly every worker has been doing for all this time. And if we can see it, we actually raise our professionality and improve our personal time management skills – therefore, viva work timers!

Also, we would really like to know your personal experience with work timers – feel free to tell us about it in the comments!