Philosophers, physicists, and laypeople alike have spent eons pondering the abstract nature of time. For something with such definitive measurements, time has interesting qualities. We can be in it, run out of it, find it, lose track of it, watch it fly by, or feel it drag on. And regardless of how we’re relating to it at any given moment, we’re almost always fighting it — especially when working on projects.
Keeping a tight schedule and balancing tasks against deadlines is a given for any project work. Though this should come as no surprise, the fact remains that many projects still end up racing against time to meet milestones and deadlines.
The importance of time-tracking accuracy in project management
For some projects, missed deadlines are simply fate. But plenty of others could have avoided this destiny by using methods and techniques to improve planning accuracy. These tools and practices can help measure and quantify the time it takes to complete tasks. Knowing this, teams can identify areas where they’re spending too much or too little time and make adjustments to improve their efficiency.
When project leaders can measure work against time with high accuracy, they can allocate resources more effectively and keep the whole team on track.
Part of tracking time more accurately is making the abstract more concrete and immediate. For example, date formulas allow you to see things like how many working days between two dates there are. Or calculate the number of weeks between two dates. Knowing there are 195 work days left until a deadline that’s nine months out is a useful metric. Never mind all the time it saves you swiping through your calendar.
Keeping an eye on the bigger picture with date functions
Without date formulas and functions, keeping track of the big picture can be difficult. But with month formulas in spreadsheets or monday.com’s task boards, you can run calculations on dates and transform them into perspectives.
Create concrete countdowns from distant dates
Calculating the days, weeks, or months leading up to a milestone can give a perspective on a deadline that feels less abstract. If it’s January 1 and a project is due on June 1, saying there are 107 work days left feels more immediate than a comfortable six months. If you’re using the right tools, you can make dates even more immediate by dividing the timeline across multiple phases. A project split four ways has a milestone every 27 work days. How’s that for concrete?
Identify the quarter and year in which a task was accomplished
Date calculations are also invaluable for reporting and insights. By looking at historical data, you can cross-reference project timelines of the past to inform your decisions in the present.
For example, by using date formulas, you can easily identify the quarter and year in which a task was accomplished. Applied to multiple tasks, you can quickly build reports showing the percentage of tasks completed in a given quarter or year. You can even build task spreads to gain insights into your team’s efficiency on past tasks to help with your current planning and resource allocation.
Other great reasons to use date formulas include:
- Future planning: Accurate and easily accessible historical data lets you plan, budget, and schedule future projects more accurately.
- Keep executives well informed: Date calculations drive robust project reporting, letting you paint a clear picture of project progress, which you can share with eager stakeholders.
- Easy auditing: If you need to provide task or project data for auditing purposes, date formulas make the process quick and painless.
Of course, time calculations aren’t just for calendars. For maximum precision, you can use the time function to turn the clock into a trusted friend rather than a staunch enemy.
Keep tabs on every minute with the time function
From basic time calculations to tracking overtime hours to time variance formulas you can use in forecasting and resource allocation, having the ability to run calculations on every minute of your project, past, and present is incredibly valuable.
Finding timely opportunities
With a couple of clicks, the time formulas in monday.com’s task boards make it easy to identify small windows of opportunity for working on certain tasks. If internal dependencies and resources only align for a few hours a day, granular scheduling lets you thread the needle rather than bring in extra resources.
With techniques like time blocking and Kanban boards, you can crisscross schedules and internal dependencies and put every minute to good use. Better still, this granular approach helps keep team members engaged, energized, and focused without overloading them with too many tasks. For remote teams working across multiple time zones, this kind of precise allocation can add up to days worth of efficiency over the long run.
Hourly wages, simplified
Naturally, time calculations are second nature to payroll pros. Incidentally, the time functions make it easy to calculate time relative to hourly rates, calculate overtime hours, or figure out how much paid time off your team members have accrued. On the project front, these same formulas are useful for managing external dependencies that charge by the hour, like contractors.
In short, time formulas and functions are immeasurably useful for measuring, managing, and allocating resources across the time and cost dimensions. But they’re also exceptionally powerful when it comes to data points and insights.
The best part is that the more data you have — rather, the more time you spend tracking and measuring projects — the more accurate your measurements are. In other words, with the right tools, you don’t have to fight the clock because the clock is fighting for you.
Use monday.com to make every minute count
With monday.com, you can stop stressing over the clock and start putting every minute to good use. Our intuitive task boards accommodate any workflow imaginable, so you and your team can track every detail of your projects, from top to bottom and start to finish. Customizable fields mean you can tailor every template to track the data that’s important to your business, not someone else’s.
The same columns and fields that make tracking tasks, resources, calendars, and projects simple also feature powerful formulas and number columns. Nearly any function or formula you can concoct in a spreadsheet can be dropped into your workflow. This means you can put number-crunching calculations everywhere without the added complexity of Excel.
But that’s not to say that monday.com is all about running numbers. With real-time collaboration built in, chat and communication front and center, and simple automation you can set up with a few clicks, your entire team will love jumping in and getting down to business.
Whether you’re scheduling tasks, designing products, or developing tools, project work on monday.com is a delight, and you know what time does when there’s fun involved.A brief history of project management
For as long as people have pondered time, they’ve been solving the world’s problems by setting goals, gathering resources, and getting to work. In short, they worked on projects. For the modern project manager, a little resource gathering in the form of a flexible Work OS and date formulas can temper tight schedules and slipped deadlines. Though time may be a universal constant, projects are a human one, and we have work to do.
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