How a remote web developer maximises productivity throughout the day

Chris works remotely as a web developer for Happy Cog, a full-service digital agency that combines design, development, and marketing to solve complex business problems using a creative and user-centered approach. He’s been using Timeular since 2018.

The challenge: easily losing focus and getting distracted

As a remote worker, Chris is aware that it’s very easy to lose focus and get distracted by the things one needs to do around the house. These distractions can stretch out the working day: “every working typically contains around seven hours of billable work. But if I take an hour’s lunch, walk the dog twice in the middle of the day, give some time to laundry etc, I find that I’m taking nearly 11 hours of the day to fit in seven hours of billable time.”

The solution: using data to improve focus

Chris started tracking his time so that he had insight into how he was spending his time. He then used this data to help him understand how he could focus on getting his work done in fewer hours.

In the beginning, he had a long list of activities: “I used to have every individual side project as their own activity, but then I decided to merge them and use #tags and @mentions to track the individual projects”.

Distinguishing between work and non-work-related activities helped Chris identify how much time he was spending not focusing on the work that counts towards his billable hours.

The data showed him that he was regularly switching between short activities, making him lose focus. Chris started shifting his household duties to later in the day. In addition, he said no to a lot of other things that took away his focus on work.

The outcome: maximizing productivity

Using Timeular, Chris was able to rearrange his day to maximize productivity. Timeular helped him create a longer period of focused time and free up more time at the end of the day.