Time tracking blog

Due to a technical snafu at a site I agreed not to name, I ended up getting a repeated “Hey, thanks for commenting on my site.  If you’ve never been here before, and enjoyed the post, why not sign up for my RSS feed?” etc. etc.  A quick email back and forth, and she’d solved the problem, but this got me to thinking about the importance of personalization.

We’ve all received these automated messages, and while the first 3 or 4 might slip by, after a while, the auto-responder is a real turn off.  If you’re going to make the effort to make the experience personal – don’t do it with an Auto-Responder.  Carve out the time to actually make a connection with someone who signs up for a subscription, or makes a ‘value’ comment.

Let’s look at this from a different angle.  Let’s say you’re having a dinner party – a really, REALLY big dinner party.  You head off to the printer to have invitations printed.  Cooking preparations start weeks in advance of the big feast.  GaryVee himself has selected the wine.  In other words – you’ve got a AAA dinner all set to go.

The table is set, the wine is decanted, the candles are lit…..and the guests begin to arrive.  Now, you’ve got two ways to handle that doorbell.

1. You promptly answer the door, smile, greet your guests, take their coat, and offer a drink and a place to sit.
2. You send your automated robot to the door welcoming guests.

Right.

Your site is your dinner party.  You’ve made all the preparations.  Your CSS is clean and crisp.  You’ve checked your feedburner feeds thrice.  Your appetizers (twitter) and main course (blog) should all lead towards dessert (the sale).  Imagine sending your Auto-Responder bot to the front door to greet your guests.  Yes, it’s better than not answering the door at all, but still not quite the overall effect we’re going for.

First impressions count.

So do yourself a favor, and go that extra mile, find the time to respond to each of your new commenter’s and/or subscribers.  My first experience with this approach came via Julian Seery Guide from Local Na8ion.  I left a comment on his personal blog, and got a human typed, actual ‘thank you’ note within the hour directly from Julian himself.  A back and forth ensued throughout the day, and low and behold, I’ve got a new follower on twitter, a facebook group request, and a new subscriber on YouTube.  Total time invested by Julian?  I’d reckon anywhere between 15-25 minutes tops.  Time invested on my end?  Approximately the same amount.

Once I started doing the same with my commenter’s and subscribers, I noticed a whopping 20-40 percent response rate to my handcrafted ‘hey thanks buddy!’ emails, which in turn has precipitated a number of great conversations, knowledge sharing and learning, and garnered a number of new connections across various social networking platforms.  Could your Auto-Responder accomplish that?

While I know that responding to each incoming message is going to take some time, it’s not a question of having the time, but rather making the time.  Agreed, not all responses are going to lead to a gold egg, but chances are, you’ll catch more flies with honey than vinegar.  Or Auto-Respond bots.

As far as business blogs and productivity tools go, there are a great number of them that, well frankly, bore the pants off of me.  Sure there’s Lifehacker which is always a guaranteed smile, but for the most part, lots and lots of business bloggers tend to grab a bunch of statistics and/or other data, run it through the ‘What would my big fancy diploma on the wall say about this’ filter, and generally spit out material that’s about as exciting to read as sniffing glue.  Wait…sniffing glue might be more entertaining.

Thank heavens for Merlin.  Merlin Mann that is.  If you’re not already familiar with Merlin and his 43 folders blog, do yourself a favor.  Merlin’s recently posted an update to slideshow/presentation that he debuted back in January at Macworld.  While I only caught bits and pieces of it through the grapevine, Merlin’s done a whole lotta work on this one, and revamped a number of topics and material.

The subject of this talk is ‘Time and Attention’.  He’ll be delivering it….hang on, just got an email.  Brb.  Right.  Where was I?  Oh yeah, Merlin’s going to be talking with the folks over at GoDaddy abou…a sec…phone.  Ummmm.  Oh right…talking to the folks at GoDaddy.com about Inbox Zero and Time and Attention.

Merlin fully admits that the irony of über cool picture slides is that you don’t get the slick audioness of it, so this deck includes some of Merlin’s main talking points.  And if you’ve never seen this guy speak…the subtitles are almost as accurate as a German translation of a French film that was directed by a Mexican director.  In other words…they do only a third of the justice as seeing Mann in person.

Mann’s main focus in this deck is Time and Attention and how to manage both to work in the utmost productive state.  Give it a whirl…tell the boss its ‘research’.

Matt Rissell joins Twitter, Ebay, Typepad, MLB, Trism, Modality and Enigma and Cro-Mag Rally to show off their cool new apps and talk about the release of the new Apple App store.

Josh Stephens from Coax Jax is one of the first customers that we’ve heard from who is using Jott Integration to keep track of employees’ time. Listen to this interview as he speaks about how TSheets and Jott have saved his company time and money by taking him from paper timesheets to voice activated time tracking.

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“TSheets’ Jott Integration has saved me alone (not counting my employees) over 10 hours of administrative work every month!”

Josh Stephens (Coax Jax)

Here’s a bit from the Coax Jax website:

At Coax Jax, we are specialists at designing and implementing custom home theater systems, as well as custom lighting, motorized window treatments, and so much more. We will give you not only incredible home theater performance but also ease of use, so that you won’t feel lost. For the music and movie enthusiast, we will turn your home into a sight and sound paradise.

Today I had a Skype conversation with Jonathan Hamel of G-Netix about his experience with TSheets. Here’s how the conversation went:

A.J. – What kind of business do you have?
Johnathan - IT (consulting, web apps development, databases, hosting, etc.)

A.J. – How long have you been using TSheets?
Johnathan - 30 days or so

A.J. – How were you tracking timesheets before you started to use TSheets?
Johnathan - Manually

A.J. – What was the problem that you ran into, has TSheets solved and if so how?
Johnathan - Keeping everything up to date (multiple employees) etc. By being web-based, Tsheets solve a lot of problems since most of our employees are home-based

A.J. – What’s your favorite feature within TSheets?
Johnathan - web based clock in / out, one click review of multiple sheets, Mobile support is interesting (not tested)

A.J. – And what’s one thing that you wish TSheets could do?
Johnathan - Important thing, we must be able to set “week cycle”. I dont know if its possible right now. For example, our week is from monday to sunday, we pay on tuesday. We should be able to visually see those weeks on a calendar (different colors). Do you understand?  
A.J. – So you’d like a calendar view of mon-sun that shows which day you paid employees on . . . is that right?
Johnathan - No standard calendar, but our week cycles are visible
A.J. – Oh I see, tuesday to tuesday? that cycle . . .
Johnathan - whichever cycle you set in your parameters, some use other cycle
A.J. – Yeah, I see now. Great idea!

A.J. – So would you recommend TSheets to others?
Johnathan - definitly

“(TSheets) is a great and affordable application to track time.”

Jonathan Hamel (G-NeTiX)

A.J. – What would you tell someone who you were talking to about TSheets?
Johnathan - i dont really understand the question
A.J. – Haha, no problem. If you were telling someone about TSheets what would you tell them?
Johnathan - ok. A great and affordable applications to track time, Flexible since web-based, good overall price vs benefits

A.J. – Wow, that’s great! Thanks so much for speaking with me today!

There are a lot of great things about working at TSheets.com.  Everything from the free bagel Fridays to the unlimited weekend of use of the corporate jet (ok, that might be a slight exaggeration).  TSheets is a great place to work.  One of the benefits of my job is that I get to talk to people.  I talk to A LOT of people.  Today I spoke with a gentleman who was just kind of frustrated. He was having a problem with his current time tracking system.  As I’ve heard all too many times before, he had originally started out by using regular old spreadsheets for his employees to fill out.

At the end of a given period he would compile the spreadsheets into one large document and run all of his reports. However, as his business grew he continued to run into a “creative” type of employee who would make his own spreadsheet.

While Michaelangelo’s “creative work” would usually look cute, it failed to meet the formatting of the larger master document. Forced to pull the reigns in on this young team member, he couldn’t help but step on toes and hurt feelings. This combined with the tedious process of compiling spreadsheets lead this business owner to realize that his process was ready for some much needed improvement.

Following the advice of his accountants he decided to try out the Peach Tree software that they recommended for him.  After experiencing several difficulties with this system, he became aware that the very accountants that recommended him use this software, weren’t using it. This left him shocked and even more frustrated.   He thought to himself, “If the product isn’t good enough for them, why are they telling me to use it?”

Needless to say he quickly discovered that Peaches should remain in the cobbler and started a new hunt for the “perfect” solution to his time tracking nightmare.  He’s looking for a way to track the employees of his small consulting firm while they work from several locations for several different companies.

A difficult conundrum that anyone interested in improving their business has no doubt at one point or another faced.

Here’s how TSheets could help someone in this situation:

1. First and foremost, JOB CODES brother!  Set up Job Codes to represent each company that your firm was working for.
2. Track those lil’ doggies!  Add your employees, give them access to work for their designated clients (ie. assign them to the appropriate Job Codes.)
3. You are now Authorized.  Once your employees have been added set up your authorization so that your employees can clock in from anywhere (you as the master administrator would set your security settings to Open.)

Three painless steps to sorting out months of nightmares?  Not only does it seem like the sensible thing to do, but also the fiscally responsible one as well.

To learn more about cases just like this one and how TSheets can save not only your sanity but your bottom line as well, sign up for a free test drive.  Take your best shot at TSheets and see if it’s the product for you.  If so, awesome, if not. . . no hard feelings, we’ll send you a postcard from our annual vacation to Jamaica.

Today I spoke with a gentleman by the name of Rob who was experiencing a very common pain point in his business. He, like many CEO’s, is very rarely in the office during the day due to the simple nature of his position. This in itself is not an issue. The issue is that his employee time tracking is based upon the honor system. Ouch. Whenever Rob is not in the office all of his employees turn into saints that never show up late and can clock out just in time to make a perfect 40 hour work week. Sound familiar?

I’m sure most all of us have been here at one point in our lives or another and just like Rob, we too have felt the pain of the “honor system.” Just think how many shekels have literally flown right out the window due to employees who fudge 15 minutes here or there.

15 minutes on clock in and clock out is an extra 30 minutes that you’re doling out to this employee every day. That’s 2.5 extra hours a week, 130 hours a year. At $6 per hour that’s almost $780 a year that you’ve lost to just one artful dodger of the timesheet. Can you imagine if you had a whole office fudging just a little here and there? And let’s face it, we’re not even sure that employees of the Vatican don’t push a number around once in a while.

Fear not Brutus of the Boardroom, there IS a solution to this. It’s called automated time tracking and it’s just one of the many beautiful things that TSheets.com can do for you! For just 10 bucks a month Rob could be saving his company thousands of dollars a year.

Is being on time important?  If so, how important?  As a company that sells a time tracking tool surely you can imagine what our answer might be, but we’re a little biased.

I just got done reading a blog post from Caroline4sumone.  In her post, Caroline writes about a situation at work where a woman known for being consistently late is hired onto a team at Caroline’s company.  Lo and behold this new employee shows up late for the very first day of work. The story is interesting but it isn’t what really got my gray matter churning.

What intrigued me were the comments that were left after Caroloine4sumone spoke about her frustration with this employee.  Here’s just a sample:

Frodo: Ah relax. being on time is overrated

highpriestess: If they are 5mins late then it’s ok but if they are an hour late and make a habit of it then it’s uncalled for.

Paul: There is nothing wrong with being late the odd time but if it is consistent then it is a problem. And it is usually the people who are consistently late that have poor productivity. Also it pisses off the other team members who feel they have managed to get in on time and have to pick up the slack. I would work with them to improve their time keeping but ultimately I would let them go if it did not improve.

Now, as far as the eagle flies, in my book output is much more important than input, but does this really matter?  Does it matter any more or less if said employee is hourly rather than salary?

If not, when does it start to matter?  How often can an employee be tardy until it’s no longer a good business decision to keep them around?

What do you think?

Here’s a fun calculation you can do.  Share your answers by leaving a comment.

L/60 x R x F = WC x 52 = YC/12 = MC

L = Average number of minutes an employee is late
R = Employee’s hourly pay rate
F = Avg. number of days per week employee is late
WC = Weekly Cost
MC = Monthly Cost
YC = Yearly Cost

*Please do not confuse this with Einstein’s theory of productivity, as that requires MC to be squared.  Squaring the TSheets theory of Being on Timeitivity could lead to the cataclysmic collapse of the sun.  DO NOT TRY AT HOME!

Green is the way to be in today’s day and age. With gas prices on the rise and the continuous pressure from the Tree Huggers of the universe, more and more offices are going green.  Recycling in the work place is just one way that we can all be a help to the environment.  Here’s how TSheets helps mother earth:

• Online timesheets – Obviously the very nature of TSheets is a green concept.  By removing all of the paper timesheets that have been flying around the office, you can save reams of paper.
• Employees can work from home – Allow your employees to work from home and keep track of who’s on the clock and what they’re working on from anywhere in the world.  In Mike’s Doc Blog he mentions how allowing your employees to work from home is better for employee moral and ultimately the environment.  Yes, there are some valid concerns that some businesses have with this concept, but it’s a great green idea that if harnessed correctly can give your company a boost!
• Wiki’s instead of user manuals – Instead of producing fancy user manuals made of paper products and ink, TSheets uses a wiki and cool videos for educating you about how to use different features.
• Emails, blogs and eNewsletters instead of mail pieces –  All of the messages and updates that you receive from TSheets are entirely eco friendly and don’t use any paper products.
• Internal emails, document systems, etc. – All of our internal documentation is printed and stored online either in Google docs or some other database service.  Also, we use Gmail to manage all of the emails, notes and assignments that we face.

Paper is a scarce resource in our office; we usually have to borrow it from our neighbors.

What is the coolest eco-friendly idea that you’ve seen and what kind of green activities do you encourage around the office?