Tag: Staff Time Tracker

How Entrepreneurs Can Stay Ahead of the Curve

As an entrepreneur, one of the most significant things you can accomplish for yourself is to set up a viable work-life balance.

When most people begin their business, they eat, sleep, and breathe work. From their life experience, they know the true value of hustle and diligence. Their whole focus is on creating something successful. In pursuit of success, they can let work consume their whole life.  

This will undoubtedly have an adverse effect on one’s health. Personal relationships become strained. The mind becomes restless and distracted. Many only seem to realize what their business needs have done to their health when it’s too late.

Balancing the needs of your business with your daily life is crucial to you and your business’s well-being. In this article, we are going to discuss four tips that can help entrepreneurs efficiently maintain a work-life balance.  

Plan Ahead

Protect your schedules and give importance to your time. It’s important to attentively plan meetings with clients and potential customers. Explain your need to give them your complete consideration and support. After that, offer suitable windows of time in which a meeting can take place.

Clients may assume that you don’t have other customers or commitments because your calendar is open for them—and so they may ask for rescheduling at the last minute or arrive late to meetings. If you don’t handle these matters delicately then they have the potential to affect your family time.

Take Time Off

It’s important to understand that enjoying your time away from work can help you remain focused while you’re at the workplace. It’s not about the number of hours you sit at your desk, it’s about the number of quality hours you spend at a task with your complete focus.

It takes numerous attempts to understand and acknowledge that getting some enjoyment out of your time off is useful for your mental well-being. Also, what’s good about running a successful business if you can’t take some time off and enjoy life?

Hire the Right People

Hire smart individuals who can efficiently maintain your business in your absence. It will allow you to take some days off and spend more time with your family. This is the reason why employing the right individuals is essential. Or else, you will end up sacrificing your own time to keep the business alive and eventually wear yourself out.

Structuring your work culture around a genuine faith in work-life balance will be tremendously beneficial in the long-run. 

Take advantage of tools

Tons of business-related services and tools are available online. Instead of trying to manually complete your tasks, look into apps that can help you automate and streamline your business. This saves time and money in the long-run. 

Make a list that includes all the must-have features that you would like from a tool. Carefully search the market once you’ve made the list. Look into apps that fit your budget. Make sure that they tick all or most of your boxes. 

To maintain a work-life balance, entrepreneurs need to cleverly utilize their time. Use time management apps, like Stafftimer, to keep track of employees and tasks.  

Stay Healthy

It’s hard to inspire and motivate others when you aren’t healthy. No matter what kinds of sales you’re bringing in, if you’re not taking care of your body, it won’t be sustainable. Put self-care at the top of your list. Exercise, get on a healthy diet and sleep 6-7 hours per day. 

These are just some ways with which entrepreneurs can balance their personal and professional life. In the end, it all depends on the individual. If a person doesn’t give importance to his/her personal relationships then there is no reason for him/her to maintain a work-life balance.

Monitor Productivity Record with Keystrokes and Mouse clicks

To run a business efficiently, sheer productivity is required and there are many ways to asses it. Calculating your company’s revenue would be the most basic indicator of productivity. But when it comes to measuring the productivity of a single employee, owners need to resort to some specific ways. Besides Stafftimer, there are few employee time tracking apps that provide keystroke counts. 

But, if an employer wants to honestly judge how productive an employee is, only calculating keyboard and mouse activity will not give the whole picture. With Stafftimer, business owners get a statistical view of keystrokes combined with mouse activity, total progress, and idle time percentages. An employee engagement activity graph is also available. 

Difference between keylogger and keystroke counter  

Both keylogger and keystroke counter is based on the same working mechanism. But the main purpose of both tools is very different. The basic reason for developing these tools was to study human-computer interaction.

This software is legal but some people use it for malicious activities such as to steal passwords and confidential information. 

For the sole purpose of employee engagement activities, this tool was tweaked and been made more secure. Now it only counts the number of keystrokes along with mouseclicks without recording any text or work information.

There exists another type of keylogger called hardware keylogger. It is a small device used as a connector between computer and keyboard. Its design resembles an ordinary PS/2 connector or USB adapter. Making it easier for someone to monitor activities and stay unseen at the same time.   

How Stafftimer use keystroke counter

To best get an idea of employee engagement activities, Stafftimer integrates idle time, mouse clicks, and keystroke counts. It combines all peripheral uses and calculates an employee’s progress based on previous keystroke number over idle time. It does all this while still maintaining the transparent relation between an employer and an employee. 

In addition, Stafftimer allows even an employee to see his or her own progress and keystroke counts so that they may increase their productivity in the future.  

To have some statistical view, both employer and employee have a bar chart on their dashboard. This chart shows an employee’s history regarding active and inactive time, based on the use of keystrokes and mouse clicks. Employers can also view the progress of their employees on a daily and hourly bases. 

Other obscure uses of keyloggers

Both small and large companies ethically use keyloggers. Most companies have a system that can detect some particular keywords. 

Nowadays, there is a conspiracy floating around that suggests that Facebook is eavesdropping its users through their microphones. But that doesn’t seem likely. Facebook’s official statement reads, “Facebook does not use your phone’s microphones to inform ads or to change what you see in your newsfeed.”

But, why does it feel like Facebook and its advertisers are in the same room with you?

This is because they are so good at tracking you online and offline that it feels like they have access to your conversations. With a legal and ethical use of keystroke logging and AI algorithms, Facebook can track your interests and show you advertisements that might catch your attention. This article on the Wallstreet journal goes into the gritty details. 

There is a term called Corporate keylogging. It refers to tracking and recording the computer activities of employees and contractors for three purposes. 

Real-time monitoring and alerting

This is especially used for IT and security personal. Why? So that they can immediately notify any suspicious or dangerous behaviors and/or activity. 

After fact investigation

To help administrators investigate system failures and data breaches. Also used to look into malicious activity during root cause analysis.

Compliance auditing

To help auditors determine how well the company is complying with laws and regulations. It also helps identify violators.  

A corporate keylogger is not used manually. It is used to search for keywords and get real-time alerts. 

Like any other tool, keyloggers can be used for legal and illegal purposes. Many parents use it on their children’s smartphones for surveillance. Stafftimer also provides daily work videos. When an employee’s keystroke counter combines with video recordings, video quality dramatically increases.