Let’s go.
What is Time Doctor?
Time Doctor is a robust employee performance management and productivity tracking tool used by large companies (like Ericsson and Verizon), as well as by small businesses (like Thrive Market), to increase productivity across the board.
Additionally, companies with a remote work model or even freelancers can use this mobile (Android) and desktop software (Windows, Linux, Mac) to track their performance.
This time tracking tool can track employee work hours down to the second. You can also track time spent on individual tasks, projects, and clients. And using this data, Time Doctor generates various real-time reports like attendance, timeline, activity summary, etc.
Additionally, it also supports performance and productivity monitoring features such as screencasts, web and app usage monitoring, and many more.
Let’s now take a closer look at Time Doctor’s key functionalities and how it can help you manage a remote team:
Time Doctor Key Features
Time Doctor offers various useful features for monitoring your employees’ productivity and performance.
Let’s take a look at the key ones in detail:
1. Time Tracking
As a hybrid or fully remote team, one of the most important tasks for an employer/manager is determining whether your employees are putting in the necessary hours on the right tasks.
Time Doctor’s time tracking feature can help you out here. Here’s how:
A. Interactive Time Tracking
Time Doctor offers a manual time tracker to track employee activity and hours during their workday.
Once you download the software, an employee can follow these steps to track time:
- Click on the desktop app icon and log in to the tracking tool.
- Create the task that you want to track.
- You’ll see a start and stop timer button next to your task.
- Click on the play button to start and stop recording time.
When employees begin work, they need to only ‘start’ the timer on their computer screen, and Time Doctor tracks their time, web and app usage in the background. Once they ‘stop’ the timer at the end of the day (or during breaks), the tool stops tracking all activity.
But what if an employee forgets to switch on the timer?
They can easily add their time manually from the Time Doctor dashboard.
However, if you feel that this happens a lot, you can use Time Doctor’s automatic time tracking mode. This mode lets Time Doctor automatically track time when the employee switches on their devices.
B. Idle Time Pop-up
Worried if an employee could start the timer and watch Netflix instead of focusing on their task?
Don’t worry. Time Doctor takes care of that as well!
The software can monitor a user’s keyboard and mouse activity to identify any idle time.
Business owners or managers can specify how long the timer can go on without any such activity. Once it reaches the limit, the tool automatically stops tracking time and displays an idle time pop-up, reminding the employee to stay focused on their tasks.
Note: Time Doctor doesn’t monitor individual keystrokes to protect user privacy. It determines inactivity only by checking if the user has pressed any key on the keyboard.
C. Offline Time Tracking
A remote employee like a sales representative or virtual assistant may face internet connectivity issues during their work hours.
Fortunately, Time Doctor counts their offline work hours.
Whenever the internet connection is down, the tool continues to track time and records it in its local cache. Once the internet connection is restored, the tool syncs the tracked time to their servers and displays it in your reports.
2. Productivity Ratings
Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter are considered productive for social media managers but not so much for developers, right?
That’s why Time Doctor lets you rate different websites and applications as productive, unproductive, neutral, and unrated according to your needs. You can also set different ratings for multiple teams.
The tool measures employee productivity depending on their productive or unproductive app and website use. Additionally, Time Doctor also lets you track individual pages visited by employees within each websit — not just the root domain.
3. Screencasts
For maximum functionality, Time Doctor supports advanced productivity management features such as screencast and screenshot monitoring.
Screenshot monitoring is an optional feature that managers can enable or disable for each employee.
Time Doctor takes automatic screenshots only when team members run the timer — not during their breaks.
The screenshot monitoring feature helps monitor any on-premise and remote employee effectively. You can use it to review work processes and improve employee productivity.
Note: Managers can give access to certain employees to blur/delete the automated screenshots if it captures any sensitive information, such as passwords.
4. Projects and Tasks
With Time Doctor, any employee can track time spent on each project or task with ease.
However, they can’t track the time for multiple tasks at the same time. But this makes project management easy as you can track the progress of each task accurately.
Additionally, Time Doctor enables you to:
- Create new projects.
- Create new tasks within projects.
- Add a permanent task for any repetitive work.
- Assign all employees or particular groups to a project.
- Integrate with different task and project management tools, such as Asana, Jira, Trello, etc.
5. Shifts and Schedules
Time Doctor’s work schedules feature allows admins and managers to create and edit work schedules within the Time Doctor app.
You can export and import CSV files to load shift schedules into the software to easily manage a timesheet, even for large teams.
You can also add the minimum working hour requirements per shift and customize schedules for each employee. This makes attendance management a piece of cake.
The feature also allows you to:
- Save time spent manually creating and updating schedules.
- Monitor and manage workloads to avoid employee burnout.
- Easily adjust schedules to ensure adequate staffing at all times.
6. Productivity Reports
Time Doctor uses detailed analytics to generate different types of comprehensive productivity reports.
Here’s a quick look into each report:
A. Activity Summary Report
The employee activity summary report shows the active minutes and seconds, unproductive time, etc., for an individual user for a selected period.
Note: Only admins or managers can access this report.
B. Attendance Report
The attendance report shows you when a user is Present, Absent, Partially Absent, or Late.
For example, an employee has a shift at 10 am, but they check-in at 11 am. Then, the report will display that they were late for that shift.
With this report, you can also:
- Adjust schedules according to employee attendance.
- See real-time attendance data.
- View attendance records and the workday activity level in the same place, etc.
C. Hours Tracked Report
The hours tracked report shows how many hours an individual user has tracked per day, per week, or for any specific date range.
D. Projects & Tasks Report
The projects & tasks report shows the time spent by employees on a project (or projects) as a whole. It also shows the time taken for individual tasks per user inside that project.
E. Timeline Report
Time Doctor’s timeline reports are available for two different periods — daily and weekly.
The daily report shows how much time an employee spends on tasks and breaks per day, including start and end times. It also shows who’s online and working, who’s on break, and the last time an employee tracked time.
The weekly report shows the overall time tracked in that week, including the total time tracked daily.
F. Web & App Usage Report
The web & app usage report displays the time spent on a website or app. It gives detailed insights about how productively the employees spend their work time.
Based on the web and app privacy settings you choose, the app and internet usage report even shows the specific pages of the website they’ve visited.
It also displays the poor time use data tracked for any date range, based on the productivity ratings for your individual user or group.
You can view the report for a specific date, week, month, etc., or have an option for tracking data for a particular timezone using the timezone dropdown on the report.
G. Custom Export Report
The custom export report allows you to create a comprehensive report based on the data you need.
You can customize the contents of the report without downloading individual reports from multiple categories.
Note: You can download these reports as PDF or CSV files to access them offline.
7. Payroll Management
With the Time Doctor app, you don’t need to depend on Excel formulas anymore when processing employee payroll. You can easily pay your employees in any currency with the app.
With this feature, you can:
- Create an automated timesheet to make batch payments irrespective of the company size.
- Set billable work hour rates, pay periods, and currencies for any employee – default for all payments.
- Set up payroll for hourly as well as salaried employees.
- Integrate your payroll with payment gateways like Paypal, Payoneer, Gusto, Wise (formerly TransferWise), etc.
8. Chrome Extension and Integrations
Time Doctor’s Chrome Extension integrates with 50+ tools that include project management, accounting, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software, and more.
Some of the popular tools it integrates with include:
- Google Apps: Track time spent by team members on any Google App.
- Jira: Track how long an employee spends on Jira issues and tasks for a given date range.
- WordPress: Use the tracking software to increase workflow efficiency by tracking time spent on WordPress management.
- Trello: Track time on Trello cards and boards using the time tracking software.
- monday.com: Combine tasks on monday.com with the time tracking tool.
- Asana: Monitor how much time your team spends on Asana tasks and projects.
Some other integrations include Zoho, ClickUp, Github, Zendesk, etc.
Time Doctor Pros
Let’s look at some other pros of using Time Doctor:
- Supports manual time editing.
- Tracks time without selecting a task.
- Strict privacy and data protection policies.
- Has a desktop app for Windows, Mac, and Linux platforms.
- Provides a mobile app for Android devices.
- Available as a powerful Chrome extension.
- Employee-friendly settings for ease of use.
- Responsive customer support team.
- Provides an API for integrating any software application.
Time Doctor Cons
Time Doctor’s robust features can help you easily manage employee productivity and performance in your company.
However, like any monitoring tool, it comes with some minor issues that can arise from improper usage of the software:
1. Managers Might Use Time Doctor to Micromanage
Managers might use the tool to control every aspect of their employee’s workday with second-by-second activity monitoring.
However, Time Doctor is designed to help you not micromanage.
With Time Doctor, you have accountability from your employees. You only need to dive into granular details if you want to track good or bad performance or if there’s a specific training need or performance issue to be addressed.
2. Employees Might Be Encouraged to Clock-In More Hours
In another scenario, companies or managers might reward those who have the highest tracked time. Such expectations can lead to employees working overtime, eventually leading to burnout.
To avoid such situations, currently, anyone can use the time and attendance reports to see if people have worked too many hours and encourage time off.
Additionally, Time Doctor is also adding a Work-Life Balance report to help employers and managers predict when employees show signs of burnout. This report will help them identify potential work-life balance issues in advance and take the right steps to address the issue.
3. Employees Might Not Like That They are Being Monitored
Sometimes employees might not be open to the idea of having their work hours and activity monitored by tools like Time Doctor.
This usually happens because they view the tool as an invasion of privacy — as with any monitoring software.
However, Time Doctor focuses on empowering employees to become more accountable and productive. It offers several employee-friendly settings, like manually editing time, disabling screen capture, and more to encourage employees to use the software.
Additionally, the tool has strict privacy and security policies to ensure employees’ safety.
Employees can use the data from the tracking app to:
- Understand their most productive hours.
- Identify the main causes of distractions.
- Recognize time management opportunities.
- Identify training possibilities, and more.
That’s why companies need to educate employees about how monitoring their performance will help them — instead of positioning the tool as a monitoring solution.
Time Doctor’s features and pros certainly outweigh any concerns about its use. And what makes it even more appealing is its extremely affordable pricing.
Time Doctor Pricing
Time Doctor offers three pricing plans:
- Basic: $7/user per month – offers time tracking + task management + unlimited screenshots + activity monitoring.
- Standard: $10/user per month – includes “Basic” features + payroll + over 60 integrations.
- Premium: $20/user per month – includes “Standard” features + client login access + concierge account setup.
Time Doctor also offers a 14-day free trial (no credit card details needed.)
Time Doctor User Ratings
Here’s the tool’s user rating on two popular review sites:
- G2: 4.3/5 (180+ user reviews)
- Capterra: 4.5/5 (300+ user reviews)
Wrapping Up
Time Doctor can be a useful asset for any team.
Its features like time tracking, productivity rating, screenshot monitoring, etc., can help you monitor employee performance effortlessly.
On the flip side, using Time Doctor improperly could raise some concerns among your employees. Fortunately, you can use the information we covered in this Time Doctor review to understand if Time Doctor is the tool for your needs and how to implement it properly.
