You have brilliant ideas, you have already found your remote team to build the ideas (if you haven’t try this one https://forstek-web.vercel.app), but you are still not sure how to manage them. Are you going to call them every single day asking for progress? But then you realized, you can’t see and verify the progress. It may not even be healthy for team morale to be asked frequently like that. As if there is no trust between you and them. Then how? There must be a solution for this kind of issue, you might think. And yes, there is! It’s a time tracker app with random screenshots captured, named Timy app. (read /taɪ-miː/)
Timy helps you to track the duration working time of your remote team for a task and also take random screenshots from their screens to verify that they are actually working on the task. This kind of tool, even if you don’t check or verify the screenshots, will have a psychological effect on the team member. Which brings them more accountable and more focused.
First benefit is to make the team more accountable. Sure, it’s because no one wants to get caught doing something else while they promise or even tell you that they are working during that time. But isn’t it more intrusive than asking for progress every day, you might ask. Not really. For most remote working teams, questions asked regularly are far more intrusive. Because the tone used in the questions might not be right or they just might not be in a good situation to reply. They have to think and compose the right answer for it. It takes more effort and time from them. Sometimes, a wrong single word on a question or on a reply will cause work relationship to become bad or even end. It really happens in some situations. Compare it to something like Timy that automatically runs in the background while they work and gives answers through screenshots and time tracked. Without them thinking and composing anything to you. Which one is better?
If you initiate the remote team with this kind of tracking tool from the beginning of the project, it’s usually not an issue. Because everyone knows that the agreement is to have this kind of working setup for the project. Moreover it’s been a norm for some remote companies or projects ,that the team probably have worked remotely before, to have this kind of remote working setup.
If you bring up this kind of tool in the middle of an ongoing project or working environment that has no tracking tool yet, it might be a little bit weird and awkward for the team. But as long as you can communicate openly with the team that this is for you not to ask for progress every day, or for you not to micromanage on every bit of the progress, they will likely understand. “Because remote working also needs a sort of management and this might be one of it, it is much better than going to an on-site working location”, your team will think.
The screenshots taken by Timy will be blurred, to avoid sensitive info being caught. Imagine when the team is working on the project, and suddenly they have to do something else urgently, but they forget to stop the timer. And an unwanted screenshot got caught. The idea of having screenshot is if you need to verify, you can do it. It’s not for you to check every screenshot recorded by Timy. Also it’s not for you to look at every pixel detail of the screen. It’s designed for you to verify by looking generally on what applications and what pages are opened on the screen. In a general sense, you will know that, ok my team is working on this task at the tracked time.
Timy also helps you to know when you need to help or bring help to the team. For example, you have a gut feeling on how long a certain task will take. Somehow, your team works on the task much much longer than your estimation. You can bring help at the right time if you know how long they have been doing the task. Without tracking the task and total duration spent on it, it will be difficult for you to do that.
Second benefit, it will make your team more focused. Because time tracking will be based on a single task, they need to focus on completing it before doing other tasks. There is some research on context switching or task change reduces team member productivity a lot. So by using Timy, they will be indirectly influenced and disciplined to have one single task done at a time. Which will be good both for the team and the project. Not to start one task, then switch to another task, then switch to another task, then back to continue the first task, at the end of the day nothing completed.
But what if the job needs to cater for multiple tasks at one time? Still, having focus on one task is much better. Everyone should make a list and prioritize the tasks even if each task won’t take a long time to complete. This will bring more focus to complete each task and make more done for the team. You can refer more to known public figures' opinions on how important having focus in progressing in almost every part of life, including work. Multitasking at one time is not a good thing.
Timy can also be used for other use cases. The following are some other use cases that Timy can help.
You are a project manager and you need to calculate the actual cost of the project. One of the difficult things to calculate is the man-hours put into the project. You don’t know how much time actually used by different project teams to work on the project so far. Ask your teams to use Timy. Make several categories based on the team names. Then see what is the total duration used by each team and total duration for the project (used by all teams).
A teacher gives homework to students and wants to verify that they do the homework on their own. The students can use Timy, with the webcam turned on during the tracking.
A recruiter gives interview problems, tasks or questions. The recruiter wants to verify the candidate answers on their own and how they get to that answer. The candidate can be asked to use Timy with the webcam turned on. The recruiter will also know how the candidate solves the task and how long it takes.
New recruits are joining your company. You are tasked to be their mentors. Sitting next to them and watching their screens are not ideal for you. You can ask them to use Timy. Every hour you can check their progress through the screenshots. You will know when they are stuck and you can help them at the right time.
You work with some people outside of your company to do certain task. They need to access your company network remotely. You don’t want them to do something else than required. But you can’t sit and monitor multiple screens at one time. Moreover you have something else to do. You can ask them to use Timy, review the screenshots after the task is completed to make sure nothing else was done on your company network.
You want to understand how early adopters of your product actually use your website or software. Instead of doing product interview sessions that might have biased answers, you ask them to use Timy. You can see now clearly how they actually use it through the screenshots.
Basically anything that needs time tracked for a certain task, or anything that needs computer screenshots to be recorded, and later be reviewed, can get help by using Timy app.
One thing to note though, you should trust human first over system. If you find discrepancy between time tracked or screenshots and your expectation, it’s better to clarify with your team. Sometimes our judgment can easily go away when we know the real story. The problematic thing usually happens when someone trusts system better than human. As if whatever the system reveals to you plus your biased judgment is the absolute truth.
The captured screenshots are blurred and encrypted. Only the project owner and related project member who can see it. Old screenshots will be removed from the Timy system regularly. For now, you can only review screenshots for today and yesterday. So make sure whenever needed you review it at the right time.
Finally, why don’t you give it a try? Go to https://timy.site. Yes, it is free! There are many more features that are too long to be explained in this article that you can find by yourself on the app.
If you need additional features, customized functionality, or even self-hosted deployment to your company network, you can request to forstek.co@gmail.com. But those won’t be free anyway. Any suggestion or feedback also can be sent to the email. Thank you for reading up to the end and have a nice day!
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