Time Tracking for Remote Teams: Best Practices

Remote work has transformed how teams operate, but it has also made time tracking more complex. Without shared office hours, managers lose visibility into how time is spent, and team members struggle with the balance between autonomy and accountability. The good news is that with the right approach, time tracking can work even better for remote teams than it does in traditional offices.

Embrace Async Workflows

Remote teams rarely work at the same time, and your time tracking process should reflect that reality. Instead of requiring real-time check-ins or live time clocks, build your workflow around asynchronous logging. Team members should be able to log their hours at the end of their workday, regardless of what timezone they are in.

Async-first time tracking also means your approval workflows need to accommodate delays. A manager in Amsterdam should not block a developer in Jakarta from logging hours simply because their schedules do not overlap. Logged's approval system handles this gracefully -- entries queue up for review, and approvers can batch-process them when it fits their schedule.

Account for Timezone Differences

Timezone complexity goes beyond scheduling meetings. When team members log time, the date they record may differ from headquarters' date. A developer finishing work at 11 PM in Tokyo is logging hours for a day that has not started yet in New York. Your time tracking system needs to handle this without creating confusion in reports.

The best approach is to let each team member log in their local timezone while the system normalizes data for reporting. This eliminates confusion and ensures that weekly and monthly summaries are accurate regardless of where team members are located. Clear timezone handling also prevents duplicate or missing entries at date boundaries.

Build Trust, Not Surveillance

The biggest mistake remote teams make with time tracking is treating it as a surveillance tool. Screenshot monitoring, mouse movement tracking, and keystroke logging destroy trust and drive away talented people. These tools measure presence, not productivity, and they create a toxic culture that undermines the flexibility remote work is supposed to provide.

Instead, focus on outcomes. Use time tracking to understand project progress, identify bottlenecks, and improve estimates -- not to police individual behavior. When team members see that their time data is used to make their work life better rather than to catch them slacking, compliance rates go up naturally. Logged is designed around this philosophy: it tracks what matters for projects and compliance without invasive monitoring.

Establish a Weekly Review Cadence

Weekly reviews are the rhythm that keeps remote time tracking on track. Set a consistent day -- Friday afternoon or Monday morning works well -- where team leads review the past week's entries. This creates a natural checkpoint that catches gaps while they are still easy to fill.

The weekly review is also an opportunity for feedback. If descriptions are too vague, hours seem unusual, or project allocations look off, a quick async message can resolve the issue. Over time, these reviews become faster as team members internalize the expected quality standards. Logged's weekly summary view and approval dashboard make these reviews efficient even for large teams.

Make It Easy or It Will Not Happen

Remote team members juggle many tools throughout their day. If time tracking requires switching to a clunky interface, remembering complex project codes, or filling in lengthy forms, compliance will drop. The best time tracking tool for remote teams is the one that takes the least effort to use.

Design your process for minimal friction. Pre-configured project lists, keyboard shortcuts, calendar-based entry, and smart defaults all reduce the effort required. When logging time takes less than 30 seconds per entry, even the most resistant team members will adopt the habit. Logged's calendar interface was built with this principle in mind -- you click, type a brief description, and move on.