If you charge your clients by the hour, it’s obvious that you need to know how long you’re spending on projects. But even if you don’t, and you currently think you don’t need to track time, you should think twice!
Keeping track of time spent is not only useful for billing, but can also contribute to a culture of open communication within your team. If a member’s time spent is visible to her peers, it’s a strong incentive to make rational decisions about how to use everyone’s time. Therefore time trackers are one of the most important tools for any leader.

Collabtive makes time tracking easy by recording time spent on tasks within projects:

After logging in and going to the dashboard of the project you worked on, hit the “Timetracker” bar.
Now you see a form like this one:

First you should check, if the preselected start date is okay for you. In most cases times are tracked right after they have been spent, so the field is initialized with the current date by default. You can switch to another date using the date picker.

The next step is entering the start time. If you click the “hh:mm” button, the current time will be filled in. You can still modify it.
Please make sure to enter times in the expected format:

• Hours: 00 to 23
• Minutes: 00 to 59

The next two fields are for end date and end time and work correspondingly.

If you want to track times very quickly, then you can now already submit the form by hitting “Add”, since the remaining fields are not required.
Otherwise you have the possibility to write a comment explaining, e.g., why you finished earlier than expected.
And you can select a task to indicate what exactly you spent the time on.

That’s it: You have created a time tracking entry.

In one of the next posts, we will explain how to make use of the times tracked, so stay tuned!