5 Ways Time-Tracking Software Can Help Maintain a Healthy Work-Life Balance

Achieving a healthy work-life balance is challenging in today’s day and age. It may surprise you, but one tool that can be a big help is actually time-tracking software such as Controlio. Despite the fact that many look at it as a stopwatch for billable hours or productivity tracker, the fact is that employee time tracking tools can offer actionable work hour analytics and data insights to help improve work-life balance.

Here’s 5 of the best ways to leverage time-tracking software and enhance work-life balance:

• Identify Time-Wasters

By tracking how time is spent and categorizing it based on activity, time-tracking software can identify areas where time is being wasted. Reprioritizing or eliminating low-value tasks that take up lots of time can not only improve efficiency, but also free up time and reallocate it to rest, exercise, or relax in other ways.

• Enforce Work-Life Boundaries

Arguably the biggest threat to work-life balance is the ‘always on’ culture that blurs the line between work hours and personal time, and leads to lots of after-hours work. Time-tracking can be an invaluable tool to set and enforce boundaries with features such as session timers and notifications that will send out alerts when work thresholds are exceeded.

For example, time-tracking software such as Controlio, Hubstaff, or Time Doctor can send out alerts after a 4 hour work session as a reminder that work is over and it is now your personal time. Sometimes a subtle nudge is all that is required to prevent digital creep and help you reinforce the line between work hours and personal time.

• Emphasize Productivity and Efficiency

Most time-tracking software provide productivity analytics that can be used to gauge individual and team efficiency. By putting the focus on productivity and efficiency, it dispels any emphasis on perfection – which is often one of the main drivers of a culture of overwork.

Switching focus to employee productivity can reduce stress levels, but still improve performance levels by identifying inefficiencies, workflow bottlenecks, and other issues that hamper productivity. Over time this can lead to improved productivity, but a better work-life balance.

• Integrate Wellness Reminders

It is recommended that you take regular breaks while working to move around, relax, and take your mind off work. Time-tracking can be an invaluable tool to send out reminders periodically during work sessions to encourage you to take breaks and make work-life balance a priority.

• Optimize Work Schedules

With the work hour analytics and employee productivity insights from time-tracking software, it is possible to identify peak performance windows. That can be used to optimize work schedules and get more done in less time – reclaiming precious hours that can then go to your personal life.

The data insights from time-tracking can also optimize work schedules in other ways such as by improving meeting schedules, reducing redundancies, and providing better prioritization for tasks. Overall it can not only free up valuable time from your work schedule, but also ensure a more sustainable long-term approach.

Conclusion

To put it simply, the use of time-tracking software is all about gaining control over work hours by analyzing how they are spent and finding ways to optimize and improve them. If you want to know why that’s important you can check out this guide for full-time and part-time employees and see how it affects work-life balance.

Although it may feel daunting at first, you can start by taking it slow. Check out time-tracking software such as Controlio, try it out, and see for yourself how it can be used to track your work hours and activities and give you insights into how to improve your work-life balance.