The secret power of time tracking

Being in a remote team forces you to use collaborative online tools for work. Miro, Trello, Airtable, Basecamp — they’re all there for your team to thrive. But the tool doesn’t bring you productivity, discipline or organization out of the box. The tool is just an aid for the already existing productivity, discipline, and organization of your team.

For our product development process at Camplight, it’s really important to see clearly who works on what. For this, we use a simple “in progress”column in Trello.

When someone starts working on a task for the day, they move their task in this column. When they have to switch to another task or finish with their current task, they remove it from “in progress”. This greatly helps the team see not only who works on what, but if someone struggles with a given task. If you move your task too often between columns or your task spends too much time “in progress” this may mean that there’s a problem. At that point, a team member would step in and ask if they need to help.

This simple process led us to develop a tool that helps us to actually track the time each task spends “in progress”. One purpose of this tracking is to do effortless and transparent billing for our clients. However, this is not the main reason we’re using it. Actually, we want to use it because it gives us accurate metrics. Based on these metrics we can do a ton of things which aid our product development efficiency:

• We can understand when someone has worked too much and prevent them from burning out
• We can understand when someone works too little and see what causes that. Is it motivation? Illness? Lack of discipline?
• We can give estimates based on data and not on cognitive biases

This is Assista — it’s a Trello powerup which integrates with your Trello flow. Don’t have an “in progress” flow? That’s okay — you can just add time by hand and have the stats that matter to your team.