

Ask HN: Timesheets - anon301

Who tracks time?<p>If so, do you do it for yourself, or as required by your employer, or are you a contractor who needs it for billing? With what granularity do you track? What tools reduce the overhead of tracking?<p>I work for a small company (&#60; 10 people) in a software R&#38;D capacity, and it's easily one of the most frustrating aspects my job. I don't end up entering hours into the software until weeks after the fact, at which point it's based on the calendar, recollections, and combing through emails and SVN commits. It takes an entire morning once a month to get up to date, and the process fills me with contempt.<p>Is there some software or methodology which reduce this friction? Is it something I should push back on more?
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kovar
I've run an IT consulting firm where accurate time keeping was critical to our
success. And I've done a host of other jobs that required time keeping for
internal accounting, audit, or just management purposes. It truly isn't
onerous if a) the tracking tool is easy to use and b) it becomes habit rather
than a chore. Clearly b is more important than a.

I've found the people who consistently opposed time tracking were often the
people who weren't using time efficiently, and therein lies some of the
friction.

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anon301
"I've found the people who consistently opposed time tracking were often the
people who weren't using time efficiently, and therein lies some of the
friction."

This is actually a big part of the frustration. I feel inefficient. But I feel
that I'm inefficient because I'm interrupted a lot, my priorities are shifted
around on me, etc. None of this is reflected there. Even with scheduled and
impromptu meetings dutifully tracked, when I look at the bare numbers, all I
see is "took three days to do something which should have been an afternoon."

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bartonfink
I track time every day, for both my day job as well as contracting work on the
side. It seems like an unnecessary effort, but I look at it as a time-saver,
analogous to not leaving dishes in the sink or doing your laundry regularly. I
don't want to have to blow hours every month trying to guess what I've been
doing so I can backfill timesheets just like I don't want to have to do three
loads of laundry after I run out of underwear.

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ctingom
I track my time religiously, and I can easily say it makes me more productive.
I suggest using a stopwatch method because you can track your time as you are
working.

