Philosophy
Time tracking, up to this point, has been a paradox. As a manager, you want to make your team more productive, and that means you need to know how your employees are spending their time. But the more precise you can get your employee's timesheets to be, the more time they're spending to be precise.
The solution so far has been to have employees manually enter time, and then to leverage statistics, averages, and simulations in an attempt to eliminate error. For example, project management systems still accept an employee-generated timesheet—painstakingly inputted by each individual in the enterprise, every week—and then they use complex algorithms specifically designed to determine just how inaccurate the timesheets submitted to you tend to be. The goal is to magically turn bad data into good data, kind of like the goal of medieval alchemy was to magically turn lead into gold.
Unfortunately, the results have been about the same: a load of lead stubbornly still being lead; a load of bad data and guesswork driving crucial human resources decisions in your business. Conventional project management systems annoy your employees and mislead your decisions because they are addressing the symptoms of the problem, not the problem itself.
The problem is that time tracking takes time. Grindstone and Task Force attack the problem, and solve it.
Grindstone is a light-weight application that sits on your employee's desktop. It makes tracking time a breeze by emphasizing the ease of use for the employee doing the work. It takes literally two clicks for them to tell Grindstone what they're working on, and Grindstone tracks the time for them. Because the only thing required now is a simple action (instead of a thought process), time tracking isn't a distraction any more, and the employee is free to expend all their mental energy on actually being productive.
Task Force is an on-line web service that collects all the time logged by your employees with Grindstone. You can leave your whole project plan open for everyone to see and work with, or assign tasks directly from Task Force to have a more hands-on management approach. Task Force can then give you up to the minute details on where your team is, and provide you with reports, charts and graphs of your employees' time from any angle.
Grindstone incentivizes accuracy by making time tracking unobtrusive and effortless, allowing Task Force to arm you with the insight you need to make good decisions. All without having a negative impact on productivity. The problem has finally been solved.
