"Time tracking" hides two very different jobs. One is attribution — proving how many hours went to which client or project, usually for billing. The other is understanding — seeing how time is actually spent so you can improve it. Picking the wrong tool for your job is why so many time-tracking rollouts quietly die.
Manual time tracking
The team starts and stops timers, or fills in a timesheet.
Strengths: precise attribution to projects/clients; the human adds context a machine can't infer ("this hour was scoping, not coding"); essential for hourly billing and invoicing.
Weaknesses: it's reconstructed from memory and rounded; people forget to start/stop timers; it adds friction to every task; and it captures intent, not reality. Nobody logs the 40 minutes lost to Slack.
If you need timesheets and overtime math, a simple work-hours calculator covers the basics without heavyweight software.
Automatic time tracking
Software records app/window usage in the background and infers where time went.
Strengths: no friction, no forgotten timers; captures the messy reality including context-switching and tool sprawl; trends are honest because they aren't self-reported.
Weaknesses: it can't read intent (was that browser tab research or a rabbit hole?); and naive implementations slide toward surveillance — screenshots, keystroke logging — which trades trust for detail you rarely need.
The third option: analytics, not tracking
Here's the reframe most teams miss. If your goal is understanding a salaried team's productivity, you may not want "time tracking" at all — you want activity analytics: focus time, category usage, and rhythm, reported as trends, with employees able to see their own data.
That's a deliberately different product than a billing timer. It doesn't care how many minutes go to "Client X"; it cares whether the team gets deep-work blocks and whether load is sustainable. ProdView sits here on purpose — automatic capture of activity metadata, never content, with full transparency. More on the privacy line in time tracking without screenshots.
Match the tool to the job and the rollout sticks. Force a billing timer onto a salaried team — or expect a productivity dashboard to produce invoices — and it won't.