Product Review: Time is Limited

I first heard about Time is Limited from a TechCrunch article celebrating their latest fundraising round and their mission to become “the Google Analytics for company time.” Time is Limited has a mission to measure organizations’ productivity data, with the goal of identifying inefficiencies that encourage leadership to make improvements. But how this does work exactly? What data does the company measure? How do they safeguard employee data considering potential privacy concerns? I spoke with Time is Limited staff to learn more about this compelling product and its potential use cases.

Productivity Philosophy

The idea for Time is Limited emerged from one of the founders’ experiences in scaling another startup. The venture was successful, but the process was painful. The growing company found itself navigating challenges stemming from dispersed employees, changing working styles, and differing management approaches. Communication was a mess. Email was laborious. Slack was a beehive of activity. And, bewilderingly, there was no software available to give concrete insights into what was going on. By developing software that aggregates data from various communication platforms at an organization and team level, Time is Limited attempts to bridge the knowledge gap that organizations face when it comes to worker productivity.

And, they do it in a responsible way. Time is Limited is a big believer in using their technology for good, to make us better humans. As such, they are firmly against monitoring individual employees and will not work with companies that come to them with requests to help them “optimize” their workforce. Their software is not intended to substitute for human analysis; rather, it is designed to help leaders cut through the noise and pinpoint the internal signals that reveal how they could be better managing their staff. Thus, Time is Limited has truly designed software to improve productivity—not in the uncomfortable “big brother” sense but, holistically, to foster employee well-being.

I’ve written elsewhere about the need to embrace a comprehensive definition of productivity. More productive employees do their best work when they operate in an environment of psychological safety. Knowledge workers also tend to be more creative and produce better output if they aren’t continuously working around the clock. Organizations stand to benefit from understanding how their workforce operates. Armed with the appropriate data, they can put in place better procedures that eliminate workflow bottlenecks and unlock latent worker potential.

Product Features

Time is Limited software deploys a variety of tools to analyze workforce operations:

• Relationship maps visualize complex relationships among people and teams in a manner that is easy to understand. The software overlays these relationship maps with usage data from collaboration tools in an organization’s technology stack. This gives insights into collaboration trends.

• Aggregated company and team data reveals which teams are using what communication methods.

I was curious to learn more about the types of metrics that the company analyzes—their detailed dashboard reports on upwards of 400 different indicators. When I spoke with the team, they shared examples of a few of these key metrics:

• The focus spend metric demonstrates the power of 1:1 meetings to unlock organizational productivity. Their data shows that, across organizations, leaders that spent more time in employee 1:1s achieved greater autonomy for their teams. Unsurprisingly, large videoconferences were far less productive. Amen.

• The planning ahead metric evaluates how much time it takes teams to schedule meetings using which tools and how the meetings are scheduled in relation to one another. For example, teams that are more agile in scheduling meetings may clash with other teams that prefer to reserve discussion topics for recurring gatherings. Teams that have a series of meetings punctuating their day have fewer uninterrupted blocks of working time and may therefore have more trouble completing tasks that require more intensive focus.

• The onboarding metric assesses whether new employees are connecting with others in the organization quickly enough.

In addition to an organization-wide view, Time is Limited offers a teams-specific analysis that is designed for use by a group of 5-8 managers. This version lets the user identify organizational targets and areas of focus stemming from those specified targets.

Product Audience

Time is Limited users tend to fall into one of three groups:

• Major makers of productivity software (e.g., Google, Slack, Zoom, Microsoft). Time is Limited partners with these companies to understand productivity trends. They also coordinate with resellers to analyze the consequences of transitioning between products.

• Large consulting companies that are running large change management engagements, such as a merger or acquisition

• Innovative companies that wish to explore either a specific use case or productivity patterns at their organization more broadly. Time is Limited data can help companies understand which teams are overloaded, where additional head count is needed, and the optimal number and type of collaboration tools to include in a company’s technology stack.

Product Pricing

I’d recommend this product for organizations that have a baseline understanding of productivity best practices and have leadership commitment to making changes—even radical changes—to improve workforce operations. Considering the valuable insights that Time is Limited data can generate for an organization, the price point of a few dollars per user per month is a bargain. It’s also comparable in price to other software-as-a-service product offerings.

Since Time is Limited is deliberately less prescriptive in recommending solutions to managers based on the data that it generates, organizations will want to make sure they do their research before investing in this data. Future product features, however, may include a best practices curriculum that helps managers interpret the data and apply solutions based on the findings.