Monitask blog

The Pitman schedule covers a 24/7 operation with four teams on 12-hour shifts, running a two on, two off, three on pattern across a 14-day cycle. Every team gets every other weekend off and never works more than three days in a row. It is popular for good reasons. It is also the schedule most…

Most guides to small business time tracking are lists of eight or ten tools. This one is not, because the tool matters less than two things nobody explains before selling you one. Record-keeping obligations do not scale with headcount. A business with three employees faces the same FLSA requirements as one with three hundred: hours…

Sourcing, interviewing and onboarding a remote employee is close to the same work as hiring anyone else, done over video. Most guides stop there, and that is why companies get surprised. The part that actually differs is jurisdictional. Employment law generally follows where the work is performed, not where the company is registered. Hiring one…

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…

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:…

2026 contains 261 weekdays and 250 working days. The first number is every Monday through Friday. The second removes the 11 US federal holidays. At eight hours a day, 250 working days come to 2,000 work hours. Neither figure is the one you should plan with. Once you subtract typical paid leave and sick days,…

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…