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Timely 2020: our year in review

Timely 2020: our year in review

Like many people, we can’t wait to see the back of 2020. Without clear boundaries or plans, the year has melted into a blurry, never-ending Groundhog sequence, with added anxiety and existentialism. As with countless other businesses, at Memory it has been a year marked by loss, confusion, insecurity and frustration across our global community.

With the future suspended, we have been forced to be present. But in doing so, this year has unwittingly created tremendous space for reflection. While the worst parts of 2020 may extend well into 2021, it’s still important to take stock of what we have been able to achieve this year.

To that end, here are a few highlights of what we managed to do in 2020 — including insights on where time actually went. As always, a tremendous “THANK YOU” is due to our brilliant user base, whose continued support, kindness and patience got us thorough this exquisitely mad year.

Where time went in 2020

Time ran a little differently this year. In fact, a total 37,964 hours were diverted to projects related to COVID-19 in 2020 across our user base. We’ve pulled together some of the most striking Timely trends for 2020 to understand where exactly our time went.

As you might expect, the average work day took a dip after the pandemic was announced in March, with people working less relative to 2019. However, the standard deviation for this period is higher in 2020, so this average does smooth over a lot of variation. Work hours picked up again from August onwards, with people working longer days on average than in 2019 from thereon. Looking at the sustained higher figures for September, October and November, we hope everyone is clocking off for December vacation a little earlier this year…

About 16% of Timely users put in overtime above their normal 40-hour working week, and that overtime was intense. The highest amount fell in spring, around the time of the the first coronavirus lockdowns — although January was also an extremely busy month. We’re quite shocked to see just how much extra time people were putting in, which in some cases nearly equated to a double working week. We're hoping that's mostly due to a reinvigoration of side projects.

Of all the apps used by Timely users, G-suite tools, email apps, Microsoft apps, Slack, YouTube and Zoom dominated. Google products massively outstripped all others...

As expected, virtual meeting software usage also skyrocketed; time in Zoom alone increased a whopping 500% from 2019. Zoom and Microsoft Teams proved to be the favoured video conferencing tools, with Google Hangouts, Whereby and BlueJeans barely getting a look in.

…And that’s before you factor in the wider communication drain of email and instant messenger tools! Time in popular email providers stayed fairly consistent with 2019 totals, but Slack witnessed a significant increase.

Timely releases and features

2020 has kept us busy, to say the least. Here’s a blast through some of our top Timely highlights:

  • Live reports — let clients see the latest time, budget, activity and billing data as it is logged
  • you can also now suggest and upvote the integrations you want us to build next using our new Integrations Portal
  • Individual capacity — make it easier to manage varying weekly hours across your team
  • Streamlined tags — quickly add tags from a specific list to your projects, and archive redundant tags from your workspace
  • Time entry history — minimize payment and billing errors
  • Memory controls — you can now schedule automatic tracking and capture idle time on your desktop devices
  • New access levels — assign people as Admins, Managers or Employees
  • Timesheet tab — your one-stop shop for quickly knocking out a timesheet

Awards and accolades

This year, Timely won no less than 53 awards from the independent software review site G2, most notably winning coveted “Leader” status among the 114 time tracking software reviewed on the platform! That means 99% of users rated Timely with 4 or 5 stars, 98% felt Timely is headed in the right direction, and overall users would recommend Timely at a rate of 97.

Other titles we scooped up include Best Usability, Most Implementable, Best Relationship and Best ROI.

Winning these awards is particularly meaningful to us, since they are 100% user-based — each category winner is decided by actual customers’ ratings, feedback and reviews.

❤️ Thank you to each and every one of you for helping us win; and if you haven’t shared you two cents yet, please take a minute to leave us a review!

We’re also ridiculously proud to announce that Memory won Innovation of the Year in this year’s Remote Tech Breakthrough awards, which recognizes the top technology companies, solutions and products in the remote technology industry today. We won out of a whopping 1,250 nominations — beating the likes of Zoom, Salesforce and Onelogin! The judges were particularly impressed by how we are leveraging AI in our tools to keep remote team visibility effortless.

Supporting customers through uncertainty

2020 was marked by rapid remote tech adoption, as companies scrambled to shift operations and management to the virtual space. But it was also a year of economic crisis, and not everyone had the budget available to invest in critical new technologies. Here are a few ways we’ve helped to support our customers through the darkest parts of the year:

  • COVID-19 relief — we’ve provided credit and discounts to customers facing acute economic hardship
  • Free trial extension — we increased our free trial to 14 days to give stretched teams more time to work out if Timely was right for them
  • Unlimited Memory history — at a time when team visibility mattered more than ever, we made Memory history unlimited across all of our plans
  • Expanded Support resources — we’ve added tons of new walkthroughs to our Timely Help Center to quickly connect you with the help you need
  • Unlocking features for free — to save our customers the hassle and potential price increases of switching to our new subscription plans, we froze the terms of our old plans and unlocked all our current features at no extra cost

Thank you to those of you who got in touch about your situation and stuck with us through such a difficult year.

Sharing our knowledge

As a company that’s been working remotely for the past six years, at Memory we have had the luxury of time to make remote work a success. While we know there is no single correct way of going about it, we wanted to share insights and knowledge that might be useful to people forced to quickly improvise remote structures during the pandemic. Here are just a handful of the remote work guides and resources we’ve put together this year:

  • Becoming a remote worker overnight
  • GUIDE: How to work from home
  • Best practice for managing remote workers
  • Avoiding overworking as a remote worker
  • Supporting remote employee mental health
  • Creating a remote communication structure
  • WFH tips from veteran remote workers
  • Setting up to work from home
  • Remote team culture

Something exciting for 2021…

We’ve also been busy building a new tool that might just revolutionize your daily workflow! Landing in 2021, Glue is an automatic knowledge hub for navigating the creative process. It unifies all your files and conversations, and helps you untangle your work. Leveraging AI — the same machine learning technology as Timely and Dewo — Glue can also identify relationships between your work and surface the most relevant information for any given moment.
While we’re still polishing and preparing the first version, we’re inviting anyone who’s interested to sign up for early access and test the whole thing out. More to come in 2021.

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