This Studio Swaps 60-Hour Weeks for Flexibility With Clockify
“Clockify is a no-brainer. You can handle big teams in real time without any hurdles.”
– Luciano Musella
Game designer and entrepreneur Luciano Musella is the CEO of Whiteboard Games — an indie studio from Argentina that creates unique experiences for gamers around the world.
While his company successfully balances creative work and productivity, it wasn’t always easy. One of Luciano’s main problems was a lack of accountability:
“People who say they work 70 hours from Monday to Friday are simply exaggerating. When you track your time precisely, you find out what working 60 hours is, and how 70 or 80 are near impossible.”
To learn how much he and his team actually worked and make improvements, Luciano used Clockify. We had a chat with Luciano to learn how our time tracker helps him and his game developers.
How Clockify helps Luciano Musella and his team
According to Luciano, game development often comes with crunch time:
“Sometimes we would just wake up, turn our computers on (we work remotely), begin a task on Clockify, and work until we got to sleep, and then start all over again. We did stop the clock to eat, shower, and attend to other basic human needs, but that was basically it.”
However, Luciano found that the key to keeping your team motivated is working just as hard — and giving proper compensation for their hard work:
“The 5 co-founders began a 50-hour shift. No employee of ours ever did overtime by request, and if they were to choose to do so, we would pay them for every 30 minutes extra they did.”
Let’s explore how else Clockify helps Luciano’s team stay productive enough to deliver quality creative work on time.
Benefit #1: Improved team dynamics
Over the course of the 2 years it took to finish their first game, the team grew from 4 to 30 employees. To keep a growing team on track, Luciano realized that tracking tasks is crucial:
“For each different area of game production, we had a task assigned to it. Each team member would start a new task and create a new entry, specifying the area and detailing what they were working on at the moment.”
Clockify lets you label each task according to a related project — helping everyone organize their work. When all team members track their time, they can also designate what they’re working on.
For Luciano, this level of organization was crucial because it helped him provide employees with more flexibility:
“From Monday to Friday, you are required to do 40 hours if you are a full-time employee. You can do them at any time of day and the number of hours that you want during that day — for instance, this creates space to have a 3-day weekend.“
Giving his employees space to operate under the 40-hour workweek proved effective. Luciano and his team would eventually release the game as planned.
Benefit #2: Better planning
As the game I See Red received funding and the team grew, expectations rose, and deadlines approached.
Luckily, Clockify’s entries and analysis proved useful to the managerial staff in determining the length and effort it took for each of the tasks to be completed:
“When you track everything with the massive precision Clockify gives you, your mind unlocks the ability to calculate tasks more precisely. That made the work on sprint planning and sprint reviews far easier.”
With Clockify’s visual reports, you can easily see how much your team is getting done on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis.
These reports are generated automatically in real time, based on your team’s tracked time. As a result, Clockify always shows you which aspect of a project is lagging behind schedule.
You can always spot bottlenecks and make changes on time to stay on deadline.
Deliver quality work consistently with Clockify
It took 2 years of ups and downs for Luciano and his college friends to accomplish what they had set out to do in 2020 — transforming a passion project into a successful company they can be proud of.
Our time tracker helped Luciano and his studio achieve more without burning out and working around the clock. With Clockify, you too can:
- Organize your team more effectively,
- Plan future projects with precision, and
- Get the most out of your staff without overworking them.
Ship your team’s deliverables with confidence.
