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.

What I actually loved about it was that it gave us proof of work by machine. Operating a marketing agency out of our office in Austin, the number one thing we always found challenging was rationalizing hours spent to clients on retainer models. My team is completely remote, spread across four states, so I'd been going on trust and the manual timesheets that we always suspected were incomplete. Now, I can bring up this perfectly clear timeline (complete with screenshots occasionally ours are in “blurry mode” for privacy) on my dashboard here to show a client precisely where the time went on their campaign. It has transformed tortuous, defensive conversations into simple information reviews if you’re asking a company about what it does to meet its hiring targets on race. Project timers also went down well with our team, and they’ll even use them to record time on a specific client project directly from their own desktop; it’s certainly significantly improved our invoicing. We rely on it daily, since it runs quietly in the background, and would wholesale change our internal chatting from "are you working? to “what can we do to make your workflow more efficient?” which is a way more productive conversation for an art team.

I won’t lie, time tracking tools kind of suck at first they feel invasive or clunky. But Monitask surprised me. It works while I’m knee-deep in keyword research or tweaking on-page tags to ensure the screens are just blurred enough out of respect but still visible as showing progress. The weekly reports are mine. I rely on them, and they save me tons of time when prepping client updates. And integrating it with Asana means I'm not tracking time twice I can just flow.