I work at a company that does outsourced work on a certain field to multiple different clients. It’s critical that we’re able to track every billable second our staff – me included – does. It’s not to prevent them from taking a break to use Facebook. It’s to allow us to know when one of us has done something we can bill the customer for. Without that we’d make no money and we’d be bankrupt in a matter of weeks. We’ve tried multiple different software to accomplish that and so far I’ve heard no complaints from anyone. Everyone knows their paycheck is directly affected by the amount of hours we can charge from our customers.

BOTTOM LINE: If you don’t like something it doesn’t make the software useless. Quoting you: “Gosh, I can’t believe that this simple truth is so hard to understand.”

Just to make sure everyone gets it: I’m not in any way affiliated with Time Doctor nor have we even tried it yet. My opinions above are based on the general situation, not TD itself. If it works with our way of working and with our hardware/software we might give it a try.

Timedoctor is mostly used at the moment in remote teams where you have for example you have team members in the Philippines and you have never met them. This is a completely different situation to an office where you see everyone come into work and you know what is going on with your team mates in a general sense. If you do not have an office, and have never met your employees, it’s nice to know what is actually going on each day.

In terms of tracking and monitoring the majority of US corporations already monitor EVERYTHING when you are at work. Some are legally required to do it. Actually Time Doctor is better because you can at any moment turn off the tracking. So the employee has complete control and can use Facebook whenever they want.

It’s nice to think that employees would work hard without any kind of discipline or structure around their work (for example a requirement to come in and work a certain amount of hours each day which is the fundamental basis of how most businesses operate) however a large majority of people simply do not have the discipline to work consistently without some element of monitoring. Come on! A large majority of people would go on 3 hour lunches every day if they could get away with it! Yes there are the minority that are so consistent and disciplined that they would never need that kind of monitoring. I’m one of those “minority” and I find Time Doctor quite useful in improving my OWN productivity. Why? Because I know exactly what I am spending my time on each day. I know how to improve and stay focussed on my priorities.

It’s true the monitoring hours worked is NOT the most important thing to monitor. As a manager you need to monitor work output first. However hours worked is a nice adjunct that helps to evaluate business processes and improve systems. You can see exactly what people are spending their time on and create systems so that less time is wasted.

Also my experience is that unproductive employees in 80% of cases do less work, are distracted in their workspace, visit sites unrelated to work etc. So it is useful as a manager to know this information.

In summary tracking work hours is not the most important thing to do, but it is very useful especially when your team are working remotely.

http://www.springahead.com

Looking forward to it guys.

I don’t really need the collaboration aspect so much… just the ability to track tasks for my three to four freelance projects. So the ultimate system would be a $10/month (or free) version of Basecamp. I like Basecamp, but don’t want to spend $25/month. One thing Basecamp has that I don’t always see offered on other programs is the “Task Lists” feature, which I like.

I tried Dooster several months ago, but based on some of the posts, I’m going to check it out again. I like the fact that it integrates with Gmail Calendar, but it seemed to have made a mess of my calendar. Perhaps it’s just some configuring I need to do on my part.

TeamBox seems nice, but I’m not sure I like the “Tasks across all projects” page. I prefer to have the tasks separated under their own projects, instead of interwoven among projects.

I just discovered TeamLab, but can’t figure out why I keep seeing “Unsorted Tasks”, where Basecamp would have a task list. Again, this might be a newbie issue. This program appears to be the most promising at this moment, but I’ve only been on it today.

Just wanted to thank you for your very informative article on outsourcing and to ask your opinion. I have an idea for an app (who doesn’t), but wanted to know which would be best, hiring by the hour or by the project?

Thank you very much for your help in this matter.

Thanks again for the nice post.

We don’t think Rentacoder (now vworker) is the best option, probably the best option for project based work but not for other hourly based work. Odesk is a great option for hourly work. Elance is better in many respects as well.

So no there was no favoring of one or the other because of affiliate links.

Is vWorker really your first choice.. or do they just offer the best affiliate commission? (they say they do).

An honest review would point out that you are making money of clicks on this page.