How Sliday built a lasting culture of time-tracking with Time

The challenge of tracking work remotely

When Sliday closed its Auckland office and went fully remote, the small, informal signals that hold a studio together quietly disappeared. You could no longer glance across the room to see who was heads-down on a client build, who had a free afternoon, or which project was quietly eating more hours than anyone had planned for.

The team tried the usual fixes first: spreadsheets, ad-hoc Slack check-ins, the occasional timesheet nobody enjoyed filling in. None of it stuck. Data was always a few days stale, half the team forgot to update it, and by the time numbers reached a manager they were more guesswork than fact. For an agency that lives and dies by accurate estimates, that was a real risk.

Why Sliday chose Time

Slack was already the beating heart of every Sliday workflow — standups, client threads, code reviews, watercooler chat. So when the team went looking for a time-tracking tool, the deciding factor was simple: it had to live where work already happened, not in yet another dashboard someone has to remember to open.

Time checked every box. Logging an hour is a quick message, not a context switch. Reports surface in the same channels where the team already talks. There was nothing new to install, no per-seat onboarding ritual, and no separate password to forget.

Day to day, the team relies on the parts that fit naturally into Slack: starting, pausing and stopping timers on a task without leaving a conversation, a live overview of who is on what, daily stand-ups, and leave and holiday requests in the same place. When someone needs the bigger picture, the connected web dashboard turns all of that into detailed reports and analytics by project, person and task.

Setup was incredibly simple — as soon as we added Time to Slack, the whole team could start logging work that same day, with no training and no onboarding deck.

David KravitzCEO at Sliday

A smooth start with immediate adoption

There was no kickoff project, no migration weekend, no "please complete your profile" emails. People added Time to the channels they already used and started tracking within minutes.

Because logging happens inside a normal Slack conversation, it never felt like a separate system to maintain. Within the first week the majority of the team was tracking daily, and the habit formed on its own rather than being enforced from the top down.

The features the team actually lives in — statuses and leave

Two features quickly became the team's favourites: live work statuses in Slack and leave requests. Instead of pinging around to ask "are you free?" or "who's off this week?", everyone can simply see it. A quick status shows who is focused, on a call, on a break or done for the day, right next to the conversation.

Leave made managers' lives dramatically easier on both sides. People request time off without leaving Slack, and approvals happen with a single tap — no email threads, no separate HR tool, no spreadsheet to reconcile. Approving or declining takes seconds, and once a request is approved it lands straight in the shared holiday calendar.

Together, statuses and leave gave the studio something it never really had while remote: a single, always-current overview for planning. Managers can look ahead, see who is available and who is away, and schedule work around real capacity instead of guesses — which is exactly what makes balanced, realistic planning possible.

Statuses and leave are the parts the team reaches for every single day. Approving time off is a two-second tap, and I can finally plan around who's actually available.

David KravitzCEO at Sliday

Clearer reporting and more trust

The biggest change wasn't the numbers — it was the conversations around them. Managers stopped chasing status updates, and designers and engineers stopped being interrupted to explain what they were working on. The data was simply there.

With a consistent stream of hours flowing in, weekly and per-client reports practically wrote themselves. Estimates got sharper because they were grounded in what past projects had actually taken. Just as importantly, the whole team shared one transparent picture of where time went — which built trust instead of suspicion.

With people working across a dozen time zones, the asynchronous side mattered most. Automated summaries, scheduled reports and one-click exports meant a manager in Europe could open a clear report on a project being built in Asia without a single sync call — quietly removing a whole category of "quick status" meetings.

Unexpected results beyond tracking

What surprised the team was how much Time improved planning and wellbeing. Because over-commitment showed up in the data early, managers could rebalance work before someone burned out instead of after.

It also changed hiring decisions. Real historical data on how long different kinds of work actually took made it far easier to know when the studio genuinely needed another pair of hands — and to justify it with evidence rather than gut feel.

The scale speaks for itself: in a single recent year the team logged 34,511 hours and 31 minutes through Time, and across more than five years of daily use that has added up to well over two hundred thousand hours of fully transparent, trusted data.

Time gave us a calm, shared source of truth. For a fully remote team, that's worth more than any single feature — it's the thing that keeps everyone rowing in the same direction.

David KravitzCEO at Sliday

Lessons learned along the way

The team's biggest takeaway was to keep tracking lightweight. Early on they were tempted to capture every sub-task in fine detail; in practice, asking for less information more consistently beat demanding perfect timesheets that nobody kept up with.

They also learned to treat the data as a conversation starter, not a scoreboard. Used to spot overload and improve estimates rather than to police people, Time became something the team trusted rather than resented.

Looking ahead — and a word from the CEO

Time-tracking has gone from a chore Sliday tolerated to a quiet habit the whole studio relies on. As the agency takes on larger, longer engagements, that shared visibility only becomes more valuable, and the team plans to lean further into automated reporting and per-client dashboards.

David's advice to other remote teams is refreshingly blunt: don't overthink it. If your team needs more clarity around time, workload and who's available, you probably already feel it. Time is simple, it lives where you already work, and it just works — so the honest answer is to start small and let the habit grow from there.