You may ask, why I’ve chose such a strange phrase for a headline. The answer is simple; I’ve met this phrase in somebody’s blog post, where unusual reasons for using time tracking tools were listed. I liked this one, as well as two more:

Because it’s the second more fun thing you can do with your right hand.

Because your granddad punched that time clock on the shop floor every day for 30 years, and you can’t click a mouse?

Nice ones, don’t you think so? In fact, it is not so easy to motivate people track their time spent on tasks. It’s a usual thing to hear from a developer, for example, about being distracted by the need to enter spent time into a task time tracker after each fulfilled task, or when switching from one task to another. While it takes only a couple of clicks.

I’m sure, many project managers have faced the challenge of making people understand the need of accurate time tracking. Explain how important is to collect and calculate billable hours, to report the right amount of them to a client. It’s normal for employees to be paid right and on time, so the fact that tracking the time spent on tasks accurately is the way to get that, is quite motivating.

Companies spend thousands on automated time tracking systems to have their productivity increased, to understand what more should be done to improve, to make accounting and billing more accurate, etc. So why not just use it without making PMs invent some tales about angel’s wings to motivate us?