Native time tracking in monday.com the way most people do it absolutely sucks! You end up with really weak-sauce reporting and hugely inaccurate time entries. The last part is mostly due to the fact that you can add a Time Tracking Column in Monday to as many boards as you want – so people do. Only problem with this approach, if you are tracking time manually you will frequently forget to start or stop the Time Tracking Column. Not only that, but you will forget which Item and even which Board that Time Tracking Column you forgot to start/stop lives.
You see where I’m going with this?
Well, I got sick of this approach – because it didn’t work any better for me than it works for anybody else.
So, I tried a bunch of third party time tracking tools. Some of these integrated with Monday either natively or “kind of integrated with monday” via a Chrome extension. Some were completely separate from Monday.
Still didn’t work well for me.
Most of them (even the ones that integrate natively with Monday) still result in you having your time tracking data in the third party time tracking app and all your other data in Monday. Not idea. Any keen Monday user will always want to have all their data in Monday – so they can access it easily, but also so they can connect their data, trigger automations using it and basically make their data work for them.
So, I went back to the drawing board, looked at monday’s native time tracking features and experimented until I found a way to track time automatically in monday that resulted in;
- Less time trackers I forgot to stop/start (I still forget from time to time – but nobody’s perfect!).
- Time entries are started and stopped automatically based on marking an item as in progress, done, paused etc.
- All my time tracking data and my only Time Tracking column lives in one board. Benefits of this approach;
- If you do forget to start/stop a timer, it’s easy to find them because they always live in the one board.
- Also, if you do forget to start/stop a timer, you can easily figure out what to adjust it to based on the time entries before/after
- Every time you track time it creates a separate time entry. So you can work on one task across several days of even have multiple team members working on the same task and each results in a separate time entry – which makes super accurate and detailed billing for billable hours finally possible.
I’ve been using this time tracking system for a couple of years now and, while it’s not perfect, it’s light years beyond anything else I have seen, it’s free, it keeps all my data in monday and I am finally billing my clients accurately (the number of times I missed a billable item and by the time I realised it was so far in the past I was too embarrassed to add it to an invoice).
I’m actually meant to be selling this system as a Monday Kitset but for the next little while I’m giving it away to a few lucky users.
If you’d like to get your hands on my Time Tracking Kitset for free (or if you have any questions), email me at support@mondaywiki.com and if you get in soon I will give you the Kitset for free.
Patrick