Gmail

Time Tracking for Google Gmail 

84% of people keep an email open in the background while working. Throughout the day, the time spent on email adds up to a dozen or more active work hours. It's also a complete drain of mental energy, especially if you need to provide detailed work or progress updates through email threads. Even though internal communication is essential, it can get in the way of focused work.

Hence, your utilization and delivery rates will suffer when company time is wasted on time-consuming communications. Email is a revenue driver in other instances - think of sales, customer success, and consulting teams. In their case, client engagement must be at the top of their list. And for you, as a business, you want to track how much time is invested in every closed deal or account expansion.

This article will show you how emails are captured on your Memory Timeline. You'll also learn why this allows you to measure time spent on internal or external communication and assign each email to the right project, so you can bill for your time spent advising clients in writing.

Can Google Gmail track time? 

No, it can’t… but did you expect the answer to be yes?

Gmail is a great tool for emails, but can also be a monumental time-sink. From ad hoc emails, to client hand holding, some days it can feel as if you never get out of the Gmail tab on your browser.

Understanding how much time you spend in Gmail is the first step to recovery.

How can you track time on Gmail?

Anyone with a Gmail account can connect this integration in Timely. You can set it up yourself, to capture all emails sent to clients, or you can encourage client-facing and sales teams to tag their email activity and generate reports on sales time spent on emails. The integration allows every employee to see the details of each sent email - such as subject, recipients, and the first line of the email – making it easier to add the relevant ones to timesheets for client or prospect outreach efforts.

What are the benefits of tracking time in Gmail?

Stop bad email practices before they become a time drain

For what was once heralded as a game changer in communications technology, email has now become associated with dread and worse – unwanted interactions. Email is a daily chore in companies, but the pain of clearing your inbox isn’t felt just by employees. When email time translates to costs, it’s experienced by businesses, too.

This is particularly true if your critical teams get pulled into long email threads that rob them of 1 or 2 hours of productive time a day. 

It doesn’t need to be this way. Any employee can set up a Gmail integration on their Timely workspace. Then, every email sent or engaged with can be reported on through an internal “Communications” project.

Once you understand your communication patterns across departments and teams, you can decide to streamline internal updates such that emails incongruent with an employee’s direct responsibilities do not interfere with his focus time. This can be done through communications manager who can help you personalise company-wide updates and coach managers on priotecting their team’s time from the disruptive effect of emails. When done right, according to Harvard Review, emails will then contribute positively to an employee’s sense of engagement.

Externally, you can assign all client-facing project updates to one person to minimize distractions for other employees solely focused on delivery.

Improve sales productivity

Despite its bad rep for productivity, email remains an important revenue-driver for sales and client facing teams. In email marketing, the ROI for email campaigns is still high: $36 for every $1 spent. In the world of sales and customer success, this metric is not as straightforward.  

It might come as a surprise that tracking the time spent on email could improve sales productivity, but Timely’s clients have seen significant results. Walpole Partnership, an IT consultancy, identified 50 hours of sunk time in the sales pipeline on deals that would have never closed. Can you imagine what your company could do with 50 hours of sales rep time?  

Time tracking for Gmail opens up similar possibilities and could potentially help you redefine sales and customer success KPIs. 

Want to elevate your sales outreach? Reduce the time spent on cold prospecting through automation and encourage reps their first emails to warm leads. See the distribution of time spent on email in these two stages of the sales funnel and give your outreach team better data to benchmark against.

Bill right for advising and servicing over email

Accountants, lawyers, consultants, and most knowledge workers take their time to provide the best level of advice and service, both in person or via email. Their communications are comprehensive, thorough, and intensely documented. The level of service provided through written communication is a deciding factor for many clients working with advisory firms. However, the time spent on emails could be documented better, even if that time should be billable to the client.

According to a study by Accelo, 40% of professionals providing services over email don’t track their time, even if their timesheets are used to bill clients directly. Unrecorded email time could lead to up to 6 days of unbilled time per month. 

With the Timely integration for Gmail, every email and time spent on it are captured on your private work timeline. All that’s needed is to drag it onto your timesheet for an entire work statement that allows your business to bill correctly for all advising services provided to clients.

Who can make the most of the Gmail time tracking integration?

• Companies that bill by the hour

• IT agencies and consultancies, app and software development agencies

• On-demand engineering teams
• Software and IT consultants