Monitask blog

The honest answer is that you cannot know whether someone is working by watching them, and remote work did not create that problem. It removed the illusion that solved it. In an office, presence stood in for productivity. Take the office away and the substitute disappears, leaving a question that was always there. Two things…

Every guide to project planning describes the same sequence: define objectives, identify stakeholders, build a work breakdown structure, estimate, schedule, add a risk register. That sequence is correct and it is not where projects go wrong. Projects go wrong in the conversion between effort and time. A team agrees a piece of work is 30…

The defining productivity story of 2026 is not that AI arrived. It is that AI arrived almost everywhere and the results have not shown up on the balance sheet. Adoption is close to universal. Behavioural data from ActivTrak covering 443 million work hours across 1,111 companies puts AI adoption at 80%. Yet a National Bureau…

A daily schedule template does one of two things depending on who is using it. A manager uses it to put the right number of people on shift at the right hours. An individual uses it to block out a day by the hour. The template below covers both, in one Excel file. The manager…

An attendance sheet records who worked, who was absent, and why, day by day. It sits underneath payroll, absence management and any dispute about hours, which is why the format matters more than it looks. The template below is free, works in Excel and Google Sheets, and totals itself. It also carries the part most…

FTE stands for full-time equivalent. It is a unit of work capacity: 1.0 FTE is one person working a full-time schedule, and everything else is expressed as a fraction of that. Two people at 20 hours a week each come to 1.0 FTE in a company where full-time means 40. The formula is one line:…

A calendar year holds 52 weeks. A full-time employee works about 50 work weeks once federal holidays come out, and closer to 46 once typical paid leave and sick days are deducted. There is also a fourth answer that catches payroll teams off guard. Under ISO 8601, 2026 has 53 weeks. For anyone running a…

A calendar month holds between 672 and 744 hours. February in a common year is the shortest at 672. The seven 31-day months each hold 744. Averaged across a full year, a month runs 730 hours. Work hours are a different figure. A full-time employee on a 40-hour week logs 160 to 184 work hours…

A year contains 8,760 hours, or 8,784 in a leap year. That is the arithmetic answer and it settles the question only if you were asking about elapsed time. For work, the standard figure is 2,080 hours — 52 weeks at 40 hours. It is the basis for salary-to-hourly conversion, FTE calculations and almost every…