Google Calendar

Time tracking for Google Calendar

Google Calendar is a powerful free resource which allows you to plan your day, deliver work, sync calendars for meetings, and get the most out of your workday. Whether it’s internal operations or delivering billable work Google Calendar allows you to document the time spent on tasks quickly and easily.

The most advanced you can get when it comes to Google Calendar’s out-of-the-box functionality is colour coding your entries, so at a glance you can get a gauge of how much work you’re completing on any given project. But that’s where it stops. For anything more advanced, you’re going to need to drop the information into a spreadsheet and get to work.

The easier way to understand how you split your time between projects is by adding your Google Calendar to your Timely workspace. From there, with this integration, you’ll be able to super charge your days and truly understand how and where you’re spending your time.

The other annoying thing about using Google Calendar for your day to day, time keeping is that is horribly inaccurate, because it wasn’t designed for it. Just because you have a one-hour entry for that work, doesn’t mean you spent the whole hour on that work. On top of this, it then takes time to enter this information into your timesheet.

Can Google Calendar track time?

No.

The best you can hope to do is log entries from your workday into Google Calendar. You’ll then be able to see what you worked on in the broadest sense.

Sent an email on another project for 2 minutes? Not recorded in Google Calendar

Took an ad hoc telephone call from a client? Not recorded in Google Calendar

Spent an extra 31 minutes on a piece of research? Not recorded in Google Calendar

By its very nature Google Calendar requires a lot of work, and a lot of maintenance to be able to get anything that remotely resembles an accurate timesheet.

Our advice: Let Google Calendar manage your diary, Timely can handle the time tracking.

How can you track time in Google Calendar?

Answer: By using the Timely app

As mentioned, the OOTB functionality within Google Calendar doesn’t lend itself to accurate time tracking, but by connecting your Google Calendar with Timely you’re able to get accurate, billable information. What’s more is that you can this in just a couple of clicks.

Once connected, you’ll automatically be able to pull in 30 days of Calendar history straight into your Timely timeline. The key information for the entries is automatically populated (subject, start time, and end time).

It’ll also pull in information for 15 days into the future but will automatically update themselves as and when meetings move around.

What are the benefits of tracking your meeting time in Google Calendar?

Improve productivity by reducing managing meeting time

The cost to businesses of unproductive meetings is reported to be an estimated $1,000,000 in large organizations, but this can equally be a huge time suck for smaller agencies or for teams that are required to visit clients on-site.

Further to this, when your team is out of site visits, it is reported they’ll go on to spend, on average, an extra 31 hours on calls.

By recording all meetings automatically against your deliverable resources you’ll be able to optimize your workday to ensure things get done and minimize unproductive spells.

Increase meeting accountability

In fact, sometimes it may be that the meeting which was initially deemed important gets switched to an email or a slack message, as it is believed that unnecessary meetings keep employees from actually working and completing tasks around 70% of the time.

The Timely x Google Calendar integration helps you to understand how much of your active time in work is spent in meetings (or preparing for them). Utilising the labelling system in Timely you’ll be able to quickly and easily create reports to get the detail, hidden in plain sight.

Finally, you’ll then be able to see how much of time in these meetings is billable, how much was preparation, and how much was spent on unnecessary updates.

Billing clients accurately

The Timely x Google Calendar integration allows you to account for ALL of your team’s time spent on a project – not just the visible parts.

Spent 30 minutes travelling to a client’s office to present… billable

Spent 41 minutes talking the client through the next project… billable

Spent 2 minutes forwarding an email, so the client doesn’t have to find it in their inbox… billable

And then once you have this information, assigning it to the correct project is as simple as dragging the memory to the right project.

Profitability

Knowing what a meeting cost you as a business is just as important as knowing how much you’re able to bill for it. One director, one consultant, one manager, two execs, and suddenly that 60-minute meeting just cost the businesses FIVE hours in deliverable time – what’s more, we’re guessing that the director and the consultant’s time isn’t cheap to begin with.

As a starting point, understanding where time is going from an operational standpoint will allow your leaders to introduce policies and behaviours in your teams which encourage asynchronous communication – increasing the time they can spend on productive and profitable work – increasing your ROI.

When meetings are charged to a client, capturing collective time spent is a challenge through Google Calendar alone, but an absolute breeze in Timely.

Who can make the most of this Google Calendar integration?

• Companies that bill by the hour
• Digital agencies, consultants, accountants
• Professional services
• Advisors, personal concierges, trainers, and coaches
• Remote teams

Timely x Google Calendar

Whether you’re looking to understand your team’s time more effectively or needing to bill your clients more accurately, by connecting your Google Calendar to Timely through this integration will enable to right data to be passed into your projects. 

This in turn will drive efficiencies across your business, allowing you and your team to focus your time and energy on profitable and productive work, rather than wondering why feel you’re always in meetings.