Outlook

Time Tracking for Outlook

Email communications can take up to 28% of productive company time – that’s active work time spent writing and responding to emails. 

It gets more complicated from here: 84% of people keep an email open in the background while working. If you’re familiar with the concept of context switching, working with a full Inbox in the background takes up your mental energy, whether you’re aware of it or not. Even though internal communication is essential, it gets in the way of focused work. 

It’s a part of your day job, and, if you’re here, you probably need to track the time spent on emails too. We’re happy to help – introducing our Outlook time tracking integration that helps you do just that. Plus, it gives you insights into how teams spend time on various types of emails, and what you can do to streamline internal communications for a lighter Inbox at the beginning of each workday.

Can Microsoft Outlook track time? 

No.

The best you can hope to do is log your email entries into a manual timesheet. You’ll then be able to see what you worked on in the broadest sense. 

Composed an email on another project kickoff for 23 minutes? Not recorded in Outlook

Spent an extra 31 minutes advising clients on next steps? Not recorded in Outlook.

Time spent on emails adds up fast, doesn’t it? Let us help you with email time tracking – for the benefit of your clients, your teams, and your business.

How can you track time on Outlook?

Use this integration in Timely to review the time spent writing and answering emails in Outlook. Email activities will appear on your private Memory timeline inside Timely throughout the day. Each email activity — or “memory” — will detail the subject field, send time, and people involved. No one but you can see this data.

What are the benefits of tracking time in Outlook?

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 an Outlook 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 managers who can help you personalize company-wide updates and coach managers on protecting their team’s time from the disruptive effect of emails. When done right, 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

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 Outlook 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 Outlook, 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 Outlook 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