Add time tracking for time tracking with every other task.
this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2024
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I actually did this at my previous job. They wanted me to time track everything I did to the minute so I started adding time spent tracking my time. Boss hated it but couldn't really do anything to get me to stop
to the minute. that sounds like you would be in a time tracking loop. I keep track to the half hour but mainly as that is a convenient calendar segmentation.
Got any tips for how to keep track when you flip between tasks so often? Program or app or paper and pen tracking?
I made a spreadsheet where one column would timestamp each row when the task note column was edited. Then another column that just checks time between timestamps to tell me how long was spent on a task. Another column was used for formatting so I could quickly copy/paste everything into the system at the end of the day
The malicious compliance that is needed.
It's not malicious. If the client wants to waste your time, you bill for the time wasted.
Anyway, my preference is still to run away.
Then start adding time for time tracking time cracking
Do you know how much time tracking you would have to do to track the time tracking of tracking time?
It's simple: Either the project management team keeps the customer away from my time tracking or I'll keep my time away from that customer
Had that once. Never again.
We had meetings with several people about 30min tasks being booked using the wrong category, despite both being part of the same budget. Absolute insanity.
My favorite was getting reamed because you put 30 minutes over the estimated hours on a task.
It made task accounting a nightmare as you'd have to dump hours onto unrelated task whenever something inevitably took longer than expected.
Such incredible bullshit. Tracking is to learn and see where things go right and wrong.
The fact manglement then puts the onus on the employee to cook te books for them is bizarre. Once tasks go over budget you can have a talk about it in a retrospective or something. But half hours.. makes no sense.
Yeah it's why at later jobs I advocate for complexity points and don't do consulting anymore.
Tying money to hours spent on a task just encourages all the wrong behavior.
Yeah, but, like, how many hours will it take for you to deliver 5 complexity points?
Yeah, exactly. My attitude is you can cook your own damn books, don’t expect me to log anything other than the actual accurate time. Although I work at a company where we have no time tracking at all, good to be free of it
my friend. you need to learn the scotty method.
I just don't work at places that do time tracking like that anymore.
admittedly better solution
Yeah which is getting into time card fraud territory. Which is just encouraged by asinine time tracking policies.
I'm pretty sure, that a lot of these policies are put in place as kompromat. If everyone technically violates policies, everyone can be fired or sued for breaking policies if something goes wrong. Management knows exactly what's going on, but they also know that the company would collapse if everyone actually followed protocol.
Someone really needs to justify their job?
The usual response is to overload them with work and basically hound them for ticket numbers, time allocation, budgets and adhere to a very rigid "no ticket, no work" version of the company policy. Preferably with all colleagues at the same time, just waiting at his desk before the boss walks in.
In that case, absolutely, yes.
Basically, their work was moved into other teams and it was obvious, that within a rather short time frame their team would be dissolved. And one way they thought to avoid that was to appear inexpensive by pushing any accountability away. Didn't work.
Had the same once. At the beginning we discussed every Hour. I left the project after about half a year for various reasons. Being the only guy left from the initial team (as a freelancer!) I said I’ld still support the other guys but only from remote.
The annoying boss left shortly after. Initial project estimation (made by him) was wrong big time. The new boss stopped caring and the project is around 2500 hours above budget for one task alone.
That’s the project of three months for you that will reach its fourth year soon. To be fair the main machine is finished. But the scope is always changing… Customers doing customer things 🤷🏻♂️
One time when I was contracting and my company was in the middle of a merger I had to do triple time keeping; client, old company, new company, all on different systems, two of which were ancient hr software from the 90s for some reason still in use 5 years ago. Its at that point I just started blanket logging 6 hours per day on whatever project I could think of at the moment.
Hard pass
So obviously this sucks, however.
Look into timewarrior+taskwarrior. They're the only tools I've ever seen for these types of tasks that don't fucking suck ass.
Then they never ask for non-ticket work outside of that... right?! (Somehow I suspect this person will want it to go their way both ways)
Hated this in one past job. It gave me great joy to quit and work somewhere that wasn't bean counting. But I can say that RescueTime with Toggl was pretty handy to track stuff. RescueTime would autotrack the time spent in different apps and tabs. Toggl allowed me to do a simple start/stop with a label for more focused work.