As one of the marketing department at a sports tech start-up that was growing rapidly, I was constantly asked what value freelancers were bringing to table and why my time and our tiny budget should go towards them. It's been an ugly ride. I implemented Monitask nine months ago because I was personally desperate to vindicate my team's output. But what’s actually been most useful isn’t the stealth mode or screenshots it's the dead-simple ability to track project time. For example, I create projects for things such as “Q1 Brand Awareness Campaign” or “Website Redesign.” My freelance writer logs into the “Blog Content” task, and I check into “Social Media Graphics.” At the end of the week, I get to hand our CEO a report: "Here's 40 hours of marketing effort and assets." It has transformed subjective feeling-based weekly updates into objective show-and-tell. I open up the dashboard every morning with my coffee to plan out my day and see how we’re doing with freelancers without having sent one, “how’s it going?” Slack message.

In shopper marketing, a big part of my budget is spent on third-party creatives and field agents who do our in-store displays and demos. I’ve got a job to do in proving that spend drives lift.” Prior to Monitask, I received invoices and prayed that the hours were accumulated. Now, I get data. I use it exclusively for following the freelancers who design our point-of-sale materials and the agencies that report on store conditions. The project-tracking capability brings me the ability to make a project titled “Whole Foods Summer 2024 Launch” and have every hour logged against it, whether I was doing graphic design, vendor management or reporting. The auto screenshots – (we use a “blurred” setting) are like my sanity check that work is actually taking place on our assets, not just being billed. It has taken a form of subjective vendor opinion and turned it into an objective performance review.

Listen, my team is on the ground 90% of the time. There was nothing I could do about this, other than observe and speculate about what happened between their a.m. check-in and after-hours email, prior to Monitask. Did they really spend three hours at the store, or was there two hours of driving and an hour-long “planning” coffee break? I have the mobile app on my phone to look at the dashboard. GPS location combined with the activity log is the killer feature for me. What I can see is the rep was at a Target store from 10AM to 12 PM and their device reflected active work in your sales app during that time. It validates their effort. Mostly, they use the basic “time tracking” feature — when they enter a store, they clock in to a task called “store visit,” then clock out on their way out. It makes people lie a little less, if Iʼm honest about it, exaggerated time reporting is down by around 30 per cent.