Marge is a graphic designer. The agency Marge works for, WeDesign is making her track her time. Marge thought that tracking time was only for people who were paid hourly, but since WeDesign bills their clients hourly, it is important to know how long it takes Marge to complete a project. This ensures that clients aren’t being overcharged. Tracking time is especially important to WeDesign since their reputation relies on good reviews. The more information WeDesign collects about how long it takes their creative team to complete projects and how many hours each team member is logging onto each project, the more accurate their estimated price will be for their clients. When WeDesign can give their clients a well estimated price, it is more likely that Marge will be able to deliver the project to their clients on time, which means better reviews for WeDesign.

At first, Marge was annoyed by this change because she thought that tracking her time would distract her from the creative process. However, time tracking applications make it easy for Marge to accurately track her time. Before WeDesign got a time tracking app, Marge was inputting her hours manually into a spread sheet. Sometimes Marge was forgetful and would guesstimate the hours she worked on a client’s project. Inaccurate time tracking proved to be a waste of time for WeDesign because it is time consuming and they failed to collect any helpful data. Marge worked together with her boss to find another solution. Now Marge can focus on creative tasks instead of worrying about logging her time.

Not only does WeDesign benefit from tracking their creative design team’s progress, but so does Marge. Since WeDesign tracks the progress of all of their employees, WeDesign can see when work is spread unevenly. Lately, Denis, one of Marge’s team members, has been slacking on creating a logo for a new client. Marge’s boss took note of this when she received the data from the time logs and assigned Denis specific task for completing the logo, lightening Marge’s workload. With time tracking, WeDesign can also accurately estimate when they might need to bring in outside help to complete a project.

Tracking her time also allows Marge to better prioritize the projects she’s working on. If she knows how long different type of projects take her to complete, then she can prioritize projects that have closer due dates and are the most time consuming. When Marge’s clients have a lot of revisions for her project Marge is able to give her clients a calculated estimate for how long she thinks the revisions will take. Marge is also able to give her clients accurate updates on her progress. Since Marge made the switch to digitally tracking her time, she can’t imagine going back to not tracking her time at all.