How am I meant to track time when people keep interrupting me?

A lot of us plan each work day. We will spend X hours working on Project A. Y hours working to land Lead B as an account. Z hours on support tasks.

How does that plan typically go? Accurate? Or is the hour you devoted to Project A interrupted by Client Q and Curbside Consultation M?

Daily plans in some offices are best thought of the "suggested serving" photos that accompany products found in the frozen foods section. They are useful wire frames but the real world can confound the modeling.

How do you account for your real day with any accuracy? Or do you just lump it all under your original plan and mentally write off these intervening tasks as the cost of doing business?

For users who like their reality real and granular, BlueCamroo has added timers. Timers seeks to model the reality of getting work done in an office environment and ensure you capture that time for both billing and tracking purposes. Timers can be used to keep track of any activity and associate the time with any kind of record (lead, account, opportunity, etc.).

As noted above, the real world for many is completing a main task with unpredictable tasks popping up and interrupting the main task. However, these intervening tasks need to be accounted for. And you'd rather not try to record everything with some sticky notes or a series of egg timers on your desk.

BlueCamroo automates this. Let's look at an example below.

You begin work on a project task. You can record the time the previous way via the Progress option and using the Add Time feature:

With the new Timers feature you can launch a timer directly for the project task. Click a task's Action link. If the task has been assigned to you, click the Add Timer option from the pop-up menu.

Now let's say as it's running, you get a request to research a support issue for a client. It's billable time and there's no time like the present to earn your company income. So you lay aside the project task for a bit and work on the support issue. You start a new timer. Once you launch the new timer, the project task timer automatically pauses.

So now you're researching the support issue when you get a request to draft an email to a client that is late in paying his bill. Making sure a client can be coaxed into paying for services already rendered seems most important so you set aside the research task and help draft up the email.

Once you're done the email, you can pause it and return to researching the support issue.

Notice, now, the research time automatically kicks back on once you paused the Draft email timer.

Once you're done with the research and you're ready to return to the project task, you can pause that timer and BlueCamroo automatically goes back to the project task timer.

The beauty here is BlueCamroo remembers the timer chain so you don't have to. And we've all had those moments where we're working on something, a task distracts us, another task distracts us, and it takes a bit to remember what were intended to do in the first place. BlueCamroo can save you valuable time getting back on task.

Once you're done with your original task and you're sure the research support and email drafting tasks are off your desk, you can now assign times. Click on the Control  button. Click the Apply Time   button.

Verify the details in the Adding New Time dialog and click Save.

Repeat for each stopped task. You'll notice once you assign the time, the timed task is removed from the right pane.