Overview of DeskTime time tracker
[Scott Friesen] Do you ever get to the end of your workday and wonder where did all of that time go or perhaps you manage a team and you'd like to know just how productive your employees actually are?
Well, in today's video, we're taking a look at a very cool time tracker which is gotta show you all of that good data.
Hello everyone, Scott Friesen here at Simpletivity helping you to get more done and enjoy less stress.
And today we are taking a look at DeskTime.
DeskTime shows you real-time analytics of what you are doing so you can improve on your own productivity.
It's also great for freelancers, if you want to track your time or your projects but it's also fantastic for businesses and teams who want to keep an eye on their employees and see what they are doing, making sure that they either check in or check out at particular times and make sure that they're not wasting all of their time on unproductive apps like we see here.
How to get started with DeskTime
Now to get started with DeskTime all you need to do is download the app to your computer.
DeskTime is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux computers.
And after that, there's really not much to it.
DeskTime is a simple application that just sits on your computer and monitors all of the websites and applications that you are working on or using throughout the course of the day.
DeskTime dashboard and data
And here within my DeskTime, I get a bit of a snapshot of what my yesterday was like.
It's gonna show me when I started my workday.
It's gotta show when I left.
And it's also gonna give me some really valuable numbers here such as my productive time, which is gonna be based on the apps and the websites which I choose to be productive.
How long DeskTime was actually recording my time and even gives me an effectiveness score and a productivity score which I find really, really interesting because of course these two things are different.
And just because you spent a lot of time at work or at your computer doesn't necessarily mean that you had a productive day.
But I think what's most valuable here is something that is called the productivity bar.
And here we can see a snapshot of my entire day.
Each of these vertical bars represents a five-minute increment so I can actually go over and I can hover through here and see exactly what I was doing in those five minutes.
And look at how many apps I actually clicked on, how many websites I should say in this case that I clicked on in just a five-minute span.
Now the good news is for the most part, I was productive in that timeframe.
However you can see that there's something here which is orange.
I did spend a little bit of time on Facebook and Twitter here as well as you can see as the day grew on, I spent a little more time on some of my unproductive and maybe social media websites as the day wore on.
But I get to see a nice snapshot of everything that is happening throughout that day.
DeskTime also allows you to fill in the blanks here.
Make manual adjustments to your time tracking
You can see that there's a few gaps where I am not at my computer.
Now it doesn't mean that these gaps were unproductive. Maybe I was at a physical meeting, for example, here in this 15-minute slot.
All I needed to do is click on this slot and I can give it a description.
I can say, well, this was a meeting with Jane.
Maybe we were in a meeting room, for example.
And I gotta say that was productive time because we were talking about a particular topic or maybe a client project.
So I'm gonna hit save in that case.
And I was gonna update that time.
You can see that now it's all green because I've manually added that in here.
Here, for example, earlier I added this as another offline time.
This is actually my lunch break.
I already gave this a label and it's just neutral, right?
It's just a neutral time.
It's not productive or unproductive.
We all deserve a break.
And so that's why this area is grayed out here.
So you can go and fill in these gaps if you need to, if you wanna get a fuller picture.
Down below you can also see some areas here where you were working on a particular project.
And again, these are all editable.
So if you need to adjust them
Identifying productive and non-productive apps
Or change the duration you can do so as well.
But I think what you really want to do, if you start off with DeskTime, is take a look at what is grouped under productive apps, unproductive apps, and neutral apps because in some cases you may need to make some changes.
For example, at first YouTube was listed as an unproductive app. And I think for many of us that might be the case, but for someone like myself who creates YouTube videos, that's actually a productive app in most cases.
So all I needed to do is come over here and I can choose if I want to make it productive, unproductive, or neutral.
And I can also do this across all employees as well. Maybe there's a difference, right, between myself and between my employees.
I've left a couple of these social media sites as unproductive because usually I'm just sort of burning off some steam and just looking up some other things.
And then there's some things that are just simply neutral here as a part of it too.
But again, it's very easy for us to go over them and adjust them if we need to if we want to change that particular category.
Speaking of categories, when we come down to the bottom here, we get sort of a nice snapshot of the entire day.
So each and every one of these apps or websites can be categorized into a variety of different places here.
So here you can see, I was very fortunate. I had a very extremely light email day yesterday, spent a little bit of time on social media but the bulk of my time was within my office apps.
I spent almost three and a half hours dealing with particular office apps there.
And so that's probably one of the main reasons why I have such a high relatively high productivity score here because I did spend the majority of my day within my office apps.
Viewing team time tracking data
But we can go one step further and go here to the dashboard and see how my team was doing yesterday.
So let's go back to Monday 'cause there's a little more data there.
Now unfortunately, myself and my coworker, we were both late. So that's letting us know here that we both arrived a little later or started our day a little bit later than we intended to.
But here again we have now a snapshot over the course of the entire day for the entire team.
And if I come down here below, it'll also give me a preview of some of their data as well.
So Jane, my coworker, I can see their productive scores and their productive times as well.
This can be a great way to see, you know, who is the most effective or most productive across your teams.
And some of DeskTime's clients include businesses well over a hundred, even several hundred employees.
So this can be very helpful.
You can break it down by individual teams as well.
And last but not least, you can check out all these productive apps and unproductive apps.
Again, this time we were looking at it across teams as a whole.
So a lot of great things here that you can work on.
Using a timer for projects in DeskTime
You may also notice in the bottom corner of my screen I've actually got a timer that is working at the moment.
What you can do is actually keep track of certain projects within DeskTime as well.
So let me minimize this just for a second.
And I'm gonna come over here to my projects. Here I've got a few sample projects that I've created.
Now, in order for us to keep track of them, you can just start this simple timer which is built right into it.
And I've spent about 33 minutes on this. If I say stop, now that's gonna be calculated.
How much time I spent on that project.
Maybe I'm done with that one. I'm gonna go onto this Trello board creation.
And I'm gonna say this is actually my setup template board. I'm gonna start that timer.
I can minimize this and just drag it to the corner of my screen.
And now I can go about my day. I can work on that particular task and then DeskTime is gonna record that for me.
It's gonna record that project time.
Here, for example, is that YouTube project that I just finished with the timer.
So it's recorded it right here. I can keep track of how long I've spent on each project.
Again, a great tool for freelancers. If you need to know how much time you've spent amongst your clients or amongst particular projects, great stuff there.
Adding work schedules and absence calendar
The last thing I wanna show you here is that you can add both work schedules here
and also an absence calendar. So for example, if I'm gonna take some vacation time
off on Thursday, I don't want DeskTime to think that I had an extremely unproductive
or I arrived incredibly late to work on Thursday. You can add that as well. So if you want to add schedules absence tracking, sick days, rest days, unpaid leave. You can do that all here within DeskTime as well. So if you love the numbers, if you want to dive deeper into either your own numbers, if you work for yourself or you're a freelancer or if you manage a team and wanna see how your entire team is doing,
I recommend that you check out DeskTime be sure to check them out by clicking
the link in the description below. Thank you so much for watching today's video
and remember being productive does not need to be difficult. In fact, it's very simple.
