When I moved from Hearst to Reddit, managing a globally distributed team became my new normal. Monitask was our infrastructure for visibility, not spying. I use it on a daily basis from my home office in New York, where I'm ever connected with teams in EMEA and APAC. What it’s best at: It turns fuzzy, subjective work into hard data. And during a big brand campaign, I know agency hours break down between strategy, creative and placement. The project-based time tracking works really well for this. I also depend a lot on the weekly automated summary reports; they give me an elevated-view of pulse on what my team is up to without having them all drop work and do status, which pulls away from progress with real work. For a platform that was founded on authenticity like Reddit was, providing an internally-consistent proof of work is right up there.

In adtech we all talk about data, transparency and trust but we couldn’t look at ourselves in the mirror. Monitask changed that. I personally use it to oversee a global team of marketers and evangelists. What I love about it is that it gives me ammo, not anxiety. When I’m spinning up a deck for a skeptical enterprise CMO, I can show now man hours applied to their campaign strategy instead of fluffy deliverables. The hidden layer and strong-activity detection are for us non-negotiable in fraud detection as we want to be sure about our data. The automated weekly productivity digest it emails me is a work of art I can identify bottlenecks (hello revision tools ad infinitum) and cheer for high-quality deep work without micromanaging.

I have to say I was a little skeptical. What I do is create genuine advocacy so the idea of “monitoring” creators didn’t feel right to that trust. But in practice Monitask was our only truth. We use it mainly to keep track of jobs that are ported into their dedicated advocacy platforms (cough Captivate) and outposts for our remote agency partners, as well as influencer teams. I was sold on the automatic time tracking attached to client advocacy projects. I can finally say no longer guess how many hours it took to build and support a community with a client. I visit the dashboard on a daily basis from our London office in order to keep a finger on the pulse of global teams. Optional blurring in screenshots makes for the perfect proof of work in sensitive campaigns! It has also changed the tenor of difficult budget conversations with clients, shifting the dialogue from value to tangible effort.