Project Time Management: Definition, Steps & Tips

Ever had more high-value projects than your team could realistically deliver — and watched deadlines slip, teams burn out, and billable hours vanish?

It’s a common challenge for agency owners and project team leads, who must navigate the delicate balance between client demands and resource allocation. While mastering project time management isn’t easy, we’ve spoken to the following agency owners who’ve each honed the art of time tracking and profitability:

• Brooklin Nash, co-founder of Beam Content
• Tom Whatley, CEO of Grizzle
• Kyle Hunt, founder of Agency Operators: Level Up
• Tony Bradberry, managing director of Grey Matter

They’ve learned how to achieve project success by tracking time effectively, pricing projects profitably, and avoiding the chaos that leads to burnout. In this article, they share the strategies and lessons that help them deliver high-quality work and maintain a healthy work-life balance.

TL:DR; Key takeaways

• Effective project time management maximizes every minute, identifies resource-draining tasks and clients, and enables better profitability and informed strategic decision-making.
• Agency owners often face common challenges, including scope creep, managing remote teams, and balancing multiple projects.
• To overcome these hurdles, agency owners should set clear expectations, lean on project management tools, and rely on metrics beyond utilization.
• Look for features like reporting, offline tracking, and automated reminders to support efficient delivery and better team visibility (Toggl Track has all of these).

What is project time management (and why is it so important)?

Project time management is a process that ensures every minute dedicated to a project is used to its fullest potential. It goes way beyond scheduling subtasks and hitting deadlines to scrutinize project profitability and prevent you from working harder for less. Here are the main benefits of project time management.

Visibility into real team capacity

Without time tracking, it’s near impossible to know how much project work your team can take on. Project time management strategies give you hard numbers, like:

• How long tasks really take
• How many hours your team actually has
• What you can reasonably deliver in a given timeframe

With that insight, you can confidently say “yes” or “no” to projects, and build realistic scopes that match your team’s true capacity.

Tony Bradberry, Managing Director at Grey Matter, saw this shift firsthand. For the first two years, his agency didn’t track time at all — it based planning on assumptions.

“We were completely anti-timesheet… It was like, let’s look at our headcount, let’s look at capacity, and then let’s look at profitability.”

Eventually, that approach broke down. Without visibility into how much time was being spent — and where — the agency struggled to scale sustainably, a problem that has now subsided with the introduction of time tracking.

“Every single process we have in the agency — we know exactly how much time it should take,” says Tony.

Clarity on which clients and tasks are draining your resources

Project time management doesn’t just tell you how much time is available — it shows you where that time is going. Whatever your project goals, it reveals a hard truth: some clients, services, or deliverables take significantly more effort than they’re worth.

By tracking time at the task and client levels, you can identify which projects drain your team’s energy without delivering sufficient value in return.

With eyes on time tracking reports, Grey Matter noticed that some projects looked profitable but were eating up way too many hours. Tony Bradberry explains,

“Some people are just super needy. And when you start looking at that, you realize that while the revenue upfront looks great, the actual time suck and the drag on the agency as a whole is huge.”

This insight gave them the confidence to re-evaluate their client base, adjust pricing, and draw clearer boundaries, helping the team focus on higher-impact work that matched their actual capacity and value.

“All revenue is not created equal,” Tony says. “All clients are not good clients.”

More accurate project scoping and planning

Once you understand how long work takes, scoping becomes less of a guess and more of a system. Time tracking provides you with historical data to work from, allowing you to build project plans that are realistic, predictable, and sustainable.

At Grey Matter, Tony Bradberry and his team formalized this approach through internal time studies.

“We’ve done time studies on everything we actually do,” he says. “Every single process we have in the agency — we know exactly how much time it should take.”

Instead of starting from scratch every time a new project kicks off, Grey Matter now uses these benchmarks to plan 90-day sprints. It knows what fits into the available hours and if it should push, adjust, or price anything differently.

The result? Fewer surprises. Clearer timelines. And a planning process grounded in evidence, not assumption.

Flexibility to build a more sustainable delivery model

When you know your project time constraints, you can build smarter systems around them — including how you structure your client engagements.

For Grey Matter, this meant shifting from fixed-scope retainers to a model based on actual hours. The agency adapts to evolving needs without constantly breaking scope or draining internal resources on complex projects.

“Our retainers are based on a set number of hours,” says Tony. “So, we know going in exactly how much time we have to work with people.”

This model gives clients the project deliverables they need while protecting the team. Instead of stretching to meet unrealistic scopes, they work within clear time boundaries — and use strategy, prioritization, and communication to make that time count.

Challenges agency owners face with project time management

Even with the right tools and intentions, managing project time isn’t always straightforward. It’s not that project leaders don’t want to manage time better; it’s that real-world constraints get in the way. The good news? The agency owners we spoke with have all faced the following challenges — and found smart, sustainable ways to overcome them.

Balancing multiple projects and priorities

Overcommitting your team — whether by underhiring or saying yes to too much — almost always leads to burnout or a drop in project success.

To avoid this, you need a clear understanding of how much work your team can realistically take on. Brooklin Nash, co-founder of Beam, is careful not to accept projects that stretch beyond his team’s true capacity — even when the potential revenue looks appealing.

“It would shift our whole structure and team for the sake of one client project, which just didn’t really feel like it set us up for long-term success,” Nash says. “Or avoiding a situation where six months in, somebody churns, and we end up having to lay somebody off anyway.”

Ensuring accurate time tracking

Agencies that offer multiple deliverables must be able to break down the exact cost and resources necessary for the different services. This means accurately tracking the time spent on every aspect of a project is essential. Grizzle’s CEO, Tom Whatley, explains:

“We track how long everything takes — from strategy to production to final delivery. That’s packaged together into a system, so we always know what’s profitable and what isn’t.”

To figure out the cost of its productized services, Grizzle has built a process that relies heavily on time tracking data to determine the timeframe of different important tasks and dependencies. 

“Let’s look at our time tracking data and, you know, see how long ‌it takes on average to produce, animate, edit, and explain a video. Therefore, on average, it costs this much,” Grizzle CEO Tom Whatley ponders, “What do we need to mark it up at the beginning to make it profitable?” 

Agencies and teams often turn to time management tools (like Toggl Track) to improve their team time management. These tools provide team leads with insights around the amount of time it takes to perform each service. This enables them to streamline project plans and optimize resource allocation.

Managing remote or async teams’ schedules

As more teams embrace remote and asynchronous work, accurate time tracking has become critical. How do you make sure to-do lists are being tackled when team members aren’t online at the same time? And how do you make sure you’re sticking to your time management plan?

Content marketing agency Grizzle prioritizes a “calm productivity” work culture.

“While we still value speed and hard work, we all have lives to live, right? And that’s why I always want to maintain a remote and asynchronous work culture,” says Whatley.

Grizzle relies on time tracking data to optimize efficiency, measure project viability, and ensure proper resource allocation while supporting a dispersed, remote team. Without time tracking or project management tools, it’s difficult to manage everyone’s project schedules and keep each team member contributing effectively and meeting their commitments.

Overcoming scope creep

Ever had a client whose project slowly expanded, and before you knew it, the workload had piled up way beyond the original boundaries? That’s called project scope creep, and if not managed properly, it can overburden your project team and derail other project progress.

A few strategies prevent scope creep from turning what should be a successful project into an overworked, underpaid nightmare. For example, you might implement a change management process that requires formal approval for any scope adjustments. Or you could use time tracking tools to observe resource allocation and estimate activity duration.

Or, you can follow in the footsteps of Grey Matter, which switched from using preset scope-based retainers to an hourly retainer model. This shift has allowed the agency to become more flexible and profitable while also gaining clearer insights into how its time was allocated among clients.

“We realized we were definitely investing too much in our clients,” says Bradberry. “We also found for some clients we weren’t investing enough time, and that actually worked out because it let us know that we could put more time and effort here to get better results.”

4 tips for mastering project time management

With the right approach, tools, and organization, you can also master project time management techniques. Here are some time management tips from some successful agency owners.

1. Set clear expectations with clients and teams

Sure, you want to win clients, but “don’t promise them the moon,” Whatley warns. It’s essential to be transparent from the outset and set realistic expectations to foster trust and prevent scope drift later on.

Project owners should also have a solid understanding of project timelines, but if issues arise, they must communicate them promptly. Without this type of transparency, clients may become anxious or distrustful. And any misalignment could lead to missed deadlines and unsatisfactory deliverables.

2. Adapt quickly to changes or unexpected delays

Even with the most refined time management skills, bottlenecks still occur, and projects become delayed. A shifted due date might not be the end of the world, but it’s crucial to adapt to these unforeseen issues in real time.

Make sure you have a trusted network of freelancers or contractors who can step in to get projects back on track. Most importantly? Always maintain open and transparent communication with your clients.

“I’m a big fan of building out a bench of people you need before you need them,” Whatley says. “And then hiring in-house once the demand is so high that it makes a lot of sense to have that seat in-house because it’s more profitable.”

3. Use project management tools to stay organized

Project management tools keep all the project details in one place, making sure teams are organized and miscommunication is reduced — especially if teams are remote or asynchronous.

Tools like Toggl Track map out timelines, set milestones, and track progress, whether online or offline. You can also forecast timelines and budgets to keep teams accountable and meet deadlines. Without central tools, collaboration can get mixed up — emails get lost, project notes are scattered, or communication becomes fragmented.

4. Don’t over-rely on utilization as a metric

Utilization isn’t an objective measurement — if you have five team members working the same number of hours on a project, it doesn’t mean the quality of work delivered will be uniform. Instead, the founder of Agency Operators: Level Up, Kyle Hunt, suggests focusing on capacity.

“Capacity I define as how many clients can this person take on with excellence and still perform at a high quality,” Hunt says. “The way you do that is to take a deep look at process, time, and how long it takes people to do things on average.”

Agency Operators: Level Up doubled its project capacity after figuring out that designers were custom-creating everything. They implemented batching and templating to improve efficiency and reduce revisions.

How to choose the right time management tool for project success

Once you start managing time more intentionally, you’ll quickly hit a wall if your tools don’t support that process. Tempted to use project management software to track project time? That’s understandable, especially if you already have a tool you love. But while PM tools are great at organizing tasks, they don’t all deliver visibility into how long your projects take, at least not in granular detail. That’s where time tracking tools become essential, giving you the data to understand effort, not just activity.

Here are some top features we recommend:

• Automated time capture: Manual tracking leads to errors and gaps. Look for tools that offer start/stop timers, background tracking, or auto-fill suggestions to reduce the burden on your team.
• Offline tracking: Standard time management tools should offer real-time tracking, but the best solutions also track offline work and sync later.
• Mobile and desktop accessibility: Whether you’re working from home on your laptop or clocking in on your phone, you should be able to access and update your time from a mobile or desktop app.
• Calendar view: To make sure you complete tasks on time, it’s helpful to visualize your workday in a calendar view. Bonus points if the tool integrates with Google or Outlook calendars (like Toggl Track).
• Strong collaboration: Choose tools with the ability to add teammates and stakeholders to time entries so you can feel confident that all work hours are captured accurately, even in disconnected environments.
• Automated reminders: A little push notification encourages team members to log their time on project activities.
• Tasks and subtasks: It’s helpful to define activities further by assigning specific project tasks and monitoring resource management for each part of the project.
• Integrations: Every project team uses its own perfect blend of project and task management software. The best time tracking platforms, like Toggl Track, link seamlessly with 100+ popular tools.
• Detailed reports: To analyze your productivity and identify areas for improved decision-making, your project management software should generate comprehensive time reports about your various projects.

Take control of your projects today

The difference between a smooth, profitable project and a stressful, over-scoped one often comes down to how well time is managed. When you understand where every hour goes, you can scope more accurately, assign work more confidently, and deliver on time …. all without overloading your team.

Toggl Track gives you that visibility. With accurate project-level time tracking and features built for real workflows, it helps project teams manage complexity without sacrificing quality.

But don’t just take our word for it. Sign up for free or speak to sales and see how better time management can lead to better project outcomes.