Get More Done with this Goal Tracker App

Hubstaff is a different kind of goal-tracking app.

It helps you track how much time you spend on specific tasks to become more efficient at reaching your goals. This allows you — and your team members — to develop better work habits while increasing your efficiency overall. But before trying Hubstaff, or any of the other free goal tracking apps available, it’s important first to understand what you actually want to achieve by tracking your smart goals.

Goals are broad, big-picture statements that reflect what your business will look like given enough time and resources to achieve it. They can be as simple as becoming more profitable, raising your community profile, or anything else you’d like to accomplish with your business in the longer term.

Objectives are the specific actions and measurable steps you and your team need to take to achieve a goal. For example, an objective that contributes toward maximizing profits might be implementing a process or tracking app that monitors staff resources and automatically bills clients, which will reduce overhead costs.

Breaking down achievable goals into simpler objectives helps to manage tasks and eliminate bad habits. Things like to-do lists, goal-tracking apps, or even a habit tracker can help. It’s that simple.

Let’s say you’ve set your goals and now have a laser focus on the direction for your company. You’ve also communicated this vision to your team and assigned staff to tasks that will help everyone stay accountable.

By adding a goal tracker app, you can create structured outlines and see your team’s progress toward goals while uncovering how best to use your organization’s resources. A goal-tracking app dashboard also helps management identify good and bad habits while motivating team members with incentives. For example, Hubstaff allows you to send achievement badges to recognize the most productive team members.

Often, a business will have multiple goals with objectives that may overlap in some areas. Goal-tracking apps are essential when combatting redundancy and can identify these areas of overlap by giving managers simple tools, like a unique color-coded system for each project.

Tracking even the most routine tasks can help everyone develop better habits while staying on track to reach those big picture goals.

Coming up with goals is the easy part. Everyone wants to be more productive, more profitable, or even more influential. The actual work lies in setting your sights on something attainable and developing a plan to make that goal a reality.

You can follow the well-known practice of setting SMART goals for more guidance.

How to set SMART goals

Specific

Your goal shouldn’t be a complex idea. Instead, try something simple like: “I want to increase profits.”

Measurable

How will you know you have succeeded in your goals? There must be a measure that you can use to see when you’ve hit your mark. Using the ‘increase profits’ example, it’s important to outline exactly how much profit is enough for your goal?

Attainable

What is a realistic goal for your organization based on its past performance? How much growth do you anticipate?

Relevant

Why does this goal matter to your company? What is the benefit of achieving this goal?

Time-Bound

Most teams don’t achieve goals overnight. How much time do you expect to take to accomplish your goal? For example, if you want to become more profitable, it will take at least a few quarters to see whether you’re honing in on your goal or not. Give it time.

With the help of a goal tracker, you can build your dreams on a foundation of success by setting reasonable goals, building good habits, and moving toward loftier targets from there.

Defining your goal is critical to its accomplishment. Earning more profits or becoming more efficient with time management are common targets, but how do you know when you’ve met them?

At what point will you be satisfied with your company’s use of time and resources? How much profit is enough?

Goals require these targets in order to create something that you can reasonably achieve.

With a goal in mind, you can then develop objectives so that everyone is moving in the right direction.

This is where most goal-setting breaks down and when frustrated owners and managers abandon ambitions. They simply don’t know how to organize the many steps that it takes to accomplish larger goals.

Setting goals requires an understanding of your time and resources

Recognize what is important to you and your business and develop realistic goals with defined targets. This will allow you to work toward something beneficial while understanding when the goal is achieved.

Breaking these goals down into digestible tasks and projects creates a roadmap to guide everyone toward a greater, final result. This is where Hubstaff’s goal-tracking app and progress charts can help.

Hubstaff gives you a simple way to manage teams and keep everyone productive. More than a goal tracker, Hubstaff gives you a suite of features including user-friendly time tracking, productivity measurement, the ability to schedule work breaks and manage time-off requests. You can even get alerts about late or no-show employees.

Review over 18 detailed time reports to uncover the least efficient areas in your organization and then boost productivity by adding personal goals and daily reminders. After implementing Hubstaff, your team will develop new habits that keep everyone focused and working as efficiently as possible.

Hubstaff’s goal tracker apps instantly improve productivity by helping team members understand how much time they spend on specific tasks. The Hubstaff dashboard gives managers and team members an overview of their workweek with activity rates and hours tracked, and how they compare to previous weeks.

Productivity features including seeing the apps and URLs used while tracking time along with activity rates based on mouse and keyboard usage provide a deeper level of goal tracking that can give each person more insight into the ways they accomplish their objectives.

Hubstaff also gives you tools for automating routine management work, like creating invoices and paying team members. With this type of work off of your plate, you can focus more on your high-priority goals instead of wasting time in messy spreadsheets.

Best of all: once you keep track of how time is being spent, it’s much easier to build healthy habits while providing stronger leadership coaching.

Sign up for Hubstaff to get instant access to goal-tracking apps with the free version. But upgrading to Starter or the Pro premium version unlocks more powerful features, such as automatic payroll, GPS and location tracking, client invoicing, project budgets, and more.

Many goal-tracking apps that are available today offer free and premium versions, such as the Strides App, Way of Life, and others. You could even choose a fun goal tracking app that offers in-game rewards around keeping and evolving good or bad habits.

What sets Hubstaff apart is that it gives you granular time tracking details you can’t find with other software. Hubstaff’s key features assist with goal setting, goal tracking, monitoring daily tasks, and more on your mobile device or desktop platform, whether you are using a free or paid plan.

But remember: to get the most out of the leading habit-tracking app, it’s important to define your goals carefully. Set goals with a broad intent in mind, and make sure they are achievable. It will help to break goals down into objectives or tasks and then assign them to your team. (In Hubstaff, you can assign these tasks to your team and have them track time directly to them. The more attention paid to developing your aims and objectives, the better your goal tracker apps will serve you.

Treat your app like a personal coach that pushes everyone to hit their own goals, and you’ll dramatically improve your chances for success.

Tips for freelancers

You don’t have to run a large company to accomplish all your goals with Hubstaff. Goal-tracking apps are useful for smaller businesses and monitoring progress with client work while keeping track of billing. Freelancers should check out the free plan and begin with creating their profile and adding tasks to their dashboard. Over time, they will better understand how to achieve their goals and improve their success rates.

Tips for teams

Hubstaff is essential for keeping everyone on the same page. It's almost like a personal productivity coach for your team. Use data visualization in your dashboard—like progress bars — to quickly figure out where the team is lagging and where it’s excelling. Achievements badges provide motivation and stoke friendly competition within your team as they progress toward completing tasks. Set reminders for your team that you’re nearing a goal or that a task deadline is approaching.