By "timetracking" do you mean getting people to record what they have been spending their time doing? Unless you are billing customers for time, why would you want to do that?
Far better in my opinion to focus on end results (feature X will be ready by date Y) than micromanaging progress by tracking time and assuming that this linearly corresponds to progress made.
Knowing how long things took vs estimates is useful for determining the accuracy future estimates.
Having an absolute sense of numbers for types of projects is useful for estimating future projects of similar scope; where by absolute I mean, not, "I think it took two weeks last time we did this".
For that kind of approach to work you'd have to be doing a lot of tasks/projects that are practically identical. I've never worked anywhere (from academic research, to startups to large companies) where any one "project" had enough commonality with others that this approach would generate any value - although I keep seeing generic PMs trying to apply it and failing over and over again.
Of course, it's a good idea to investigate why expected timescales differed from expectations - but IMHO detailed time recording isn't the way to do that.
When it comes to startups I'm not sure you can prioritise things like this over actually working on your product.
Also, if you're measuring and refining your estimates, they stop being 'estimates' and become something far less useful. If you have problems with estimates being inaccurate, try not estimating.
There are far more interesting metrics to measure rather than flogging a dead horse.
I agree - time tracking on a granualar level is very high friction and ends up being a waste of time. Better to focus on things that bring more ROI, like product.
Unless your billing on an hourly basis, chances are that counting hours is too much micromanagement.
I should have qualified my response, but I was running to a meeting at the time: It's not mandated by law for all companies, of course; that would be insane.
Time tracking is required for any company that bills clients by some unit of time (or bills another department within the same company for services, which is fairly common for large companies). Even if part of your workday is not related to external customers, once you are "tainted" by the time-tracking clause, you have to track all your work hours. For example, I myself work on a product as a developer, and only a small part of my time is spent directly servicing customers. Even so, all my work hours have to be logged.
I am allowed to log all my internal hours as one block if I want, but the manager guys like seeing how/where our time is spent, so they want us to log our work hours as finely grained as possible. We are a small 15-person company, so it feels a bit weird, but it's not a huge bother. We currently use Harvest, which is not a good app for managing a project, but is a very good app for invoicing.
The whole law is probably related to some EU directive, but I don't know the specifics.
Obviously this doesn't apply in Norway - but doesn't the EU working time directive require that, unless you opt out, your time has to be recorded so that it can be demonstrated you aren't being made to work more than 48 hours?
I use Freckle for myself, since I feel I'm more productive if I track what I spend my time (on the computer) doing. It's a bit like tracking your weight, wether you're on a diet or not. Just being aware of it is enough :)
Used to use a very basic and dorky app called TraxTime but since the start of the year, have been using a web-app which I built myself. We call it Punch.
Company of three web developers clocking time and billing clients. Punch runs in a little Chrome window on the side of our second monitors. I can keep track of what the other guys have been, or are, working on; check our general productivity; it handles invoicing, and can give me hints on which clients are strong earners and which are a waste of time.
I don't need crazy CRM features, but have been thinking about quickly adding in a list showing neglected clients (so we can contact them and see if they have any maintenance needing to be done).
OfficeTime is the best simple time tracking app I've found so far. (It's not a project management tool or anything like that. Just a low friction way to track time.) It does some reporting and the data can be exported.
At entp we used a custom-built time tracker that works a bit like twitter; you tell it what you're working on (projects are referenced with @projectname and individual tickets with #1234) and it tracks the time between status updates to that project. It shows what everyone's latest status is, so it's good for a team to get visibility into everyone.
We used it extensively when we were mainly a widely distributed consulting company (4 countries, 4 US states, 20 devs) and continued using it after we dropped the clients. It's useful to see the hard costs of building certain features and even entire apps; there's also a ton of useful data about how many hours people are pulling a week, what time we show up for work, as well as the basic "what are you working on?"
However, the dev team is pretty small right now so we have ditched the time tracking. We are moving to a new tool that we're building which focuses more on how you feel about what you're working on.
Courtney, can I contact you about your new tool ("how you feel about what you're working on")? I think there are some ideas we could share. My email is my username at gmail.
If you are talking about time tracking as far as project management goes and not for how many hours to bill to client, then I don't believe in using one.
Why? In most cases you are using time tracking as a way to provide metrics for productivity or compensation. Once employees are incentivized to do a task within a certain time frame (i.e. average ticket close less than 2 hours) they will focus more on the end result (closing the ticket) rather than the actual task at hand (fixing the issue). For example in software development this can lead to developers who take shortcuts to simply fix the problem, but not necessarily fix the problem effectively (i.e. bad code).
I use toggl, but since I've only serving private client contact at at the moment, i'm using Freshbooks for invoicing (one client = free). They have their own timetracking, so considering to use their feature instead of Toggl.
Regardless I have good experience with toggl, expecially since it allows exporting to CSV/XML/PDF which allows for rapid coupling with any invoicing system or own project management tools.
I'm using mite (http://mite.yo.lk/) for my freelance work, bit we don't use time tracking at our startup. The tech guys measure productivity by checking or crossing out squares on a squared notepad, but that's exclusively for self-assessment: How much time do I spend working productively, how much is wasted on interruptions, etc.
I am currently using toggl (http://www.toggl.com). I am not using it for billing nor for monitoring employees, but for monitoring how I spend time. The purpose is to balance work between my several projects on which I work concurrently, and also to avoid procrastination and wasting time on distractions.
I spent a lot of time (pun intended), i.e. about half a day, on searching a time tracker that would fit my needs. I was not interested in features related to billing clients, and thus I found too expensive the services that seem to be most popular, like Harvest, whose pricing starts at $12 per month if one works on more than 2 projects. I would not pay more than $1 per month for a simple time tracking service. I needed a web application / service, as opposed to client software, since I work on multiple computers. Also, the ideal service that I was looking for would have an Android app such that I could track time when I'm not using a computer.
Toggl does all of these within the free plan, however it is somehow buggy - the Android app, the desktop app and the web service do not synchronize well and I am kind of forced to use just the web service through a browser.
I would be interested to find out about other apps that would do the job.
wow toggl is exactly the kind of software i was looking for. I could only find super expensive software that did way too much stuff and was overcomplicated. In toggl you can just add a project, add a task manually or time it. This is perfect.
Another great app to check out is TSheets (http://www.tsheets.com). I have no problem clocking in from my Droid or any computer - or even by simply sending a text!
Whatever solution you choose, there are two key points:
1) Make it as frictionless as possible for the people tracking their time, or you will inevitably have people not doing it, and then someone has to hound them, and then they just put in junk data just to stop the hounding. Your "to the hour" metrics end up just being junk.
2) If you aren't actually using the data, don't make people track their time "just in case". Or at least assign it a real cost, and say, "Is this data worth 2% of my payroll to me?" In poorly run companies, this tends to be a classic example of management wasting the employees time for no reason, just because someone said they were supposed to do time tracking but management never gets around to using the data for anything.
I am actually an employee of my startup, and what you described in 1) is exactly what is happening. We use dotproject which is probably one of the worst piece of software ever shipped, and the data is used but nowhere near a goal that is worth the pain.
My (as yet unobtained) goal is to get familiar enough with org-mode[1] and figure out a personal workflow that fits with my company, so that I can manage a planning/clocking setup along the lines of http://doc.norang.ca/org-mode.html#Clocking
It's complicated by a couple of factors:
* nobody else at work would be using the same system (but we don't use anything anyway)
* I don't use emacs for mail, and haven't yet got it to talk to google calendar in a sensible fashion
* my elisp is about as good as any of my other lisps, which is practically nothing.
On the plus side:
* Evidence based scheduling - I'm a crap planner, and being able to compare estimates with reality would be the first step towards fixing it.
* I could stop making up arbitrary numbers of hours worked on a given project, and actually provide some evidence.[2]
* Formalising a workflow would help keep me on track when I'm not sure what needs doing next.
* Having a tracker/agenda/scheduler/outliner all together makes for some interesting integration potential.
[1] http://orgmode.org/ - outliner with all sorts of extra shineys for Emacs.
[2] Less unethical than it sounds - I'm basically subtracting out the time I spend faffing around on the internet. But I suspect I'm sometimes too generous with my subtractions.
YES! I didn't and wish I had. It's worth checking out TSheets (https://www.tsheets.com) for tracking your time spent on several projects/clients. Good luck!
39 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 83.5 ms ] threadFar better in my opinion to focus on end results (feature X will be ready by date Y) than micromanaging progress by tracking time and assuming that this linearly corresponds to progress made.
Knowing how long things took vs estimates is useful for determining the accuracy future estimates.
Having an absolute sense of numbers for types of projects is useful for estimating future projects of similar scope; where by absolute I mean, not, "I think it took two weeks last time we did this".
Of course, it's a good idea to investigate why expected timescales differed from expectations - but IMHO detailed time recording isn't the way to do that.
Of course, YMMV.
Also, if you're measuring and refining your estimates, they stop being 'estimates' and become something far less useful. If you have problems with estimates being inaccurate, try not estimating.
There are far more interesting metrics to measure rather than flogging a dead horse.
Unless your billing on an hourly basis, chances are that counting hours is too much micromanagement.
Time tracking is required for any company that bills clients by some unit of time (or bills another department within the same company for services, which is fairly common for large companies). Even if part of your workday is not related to external customers, once you are "tainted" by the time-tracking clause, you have to track all your work hours. For example, I myself work on a product as a developer, and only a small part of my time is spent directly servicing customers. Even so, all my work hours have to be logged.
I am allowed to log all my internal hours as one block if I want, but the manager guys like seeing how/where our time is spent, so they want us to log our work hours as finely grained as possible. We are a small 15-person company, so it feels a bit weird, but it's not a huge bother. We currently use Harvest, which is not a good app for managing a project, but is a very good app for invoicing.
The whole law is probably related to some EU directive, but I don't know the specifics.
Of course, a lot of people simply opt out!
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/10/26.html
Company of three web developers clocking time and billing clients. Punch runs in a little Chrome window on the side of our second monitors. I can keep track of what the other guys have been, or are, working on; check our general productivity; it handles invoicing, and can give me hints on which clients are strong earners and which are a waste of time.
I don't need crazy CRM features, but have been thinking about quickly adding in a list showing neglected clients (so we can contact them and see if they have any maintenance needing to be done).
It's open source! https://github.com/entp/xtt
We used it extensively when we were mainly a widely distributed consulting company (4 countries, 4 US states, 20 devs) and continued using it after we dropped the clients. It's useful to see the hard costs of building certain features and even entire apps; there's also a ton of useful data about how many hours people are pulling a week, what time we show up for work, as well as the basic "what are you working on?"
However, the dev team is pretty small right now so we have ditched the time tracking. We are moving to a new tool that we're building which focuses more on how you feel about what you're working on.
Why? In most cases you are using time tracking as a way to provide metrics for productivity or compensation. Once employees are incentivized to do a task within a certain time frame (i.e. average ticket close less than 2 hours) they will focus more on the end result (closing the ticket) rather than the actual task at hand (fixing the issue). For example in software development this can lead to developers who take shortcuts to simply fix the problem, but not necessarily fix the problem effectively (i.e. bad code).
I spent a lot of time (pun intended), i.e. about half a day, on searching a time tracker that would fit my needs. I was not interested in features related to billing clients, and thus I found too expensive the services that seem to be most popular, like Harvest, whose pricing starts at $12 per month if one works on more than 2 projects. I would not pay more than $1 per month for a simple time tracking service. I needed a web application / service, as opposed to client software, since I work on multiple computers. Also, the ideal service that I was looking for would have an Android app such that I could track time when I'm not using a computer.
Toggl does all of these within the free plan, however it is somehow buggy - the Android app, the desktop app and the web service do not synchronize well and I am kind of forced to use just the web service through a browser.
I would be interested to find out about other apps that would do the job.
1) Make it as frictionless as possible for the people tracking their time, or you will inevitably have people not doing it, and then someone has to hound them, and then they just put in junk data just to stop the hounding. Your "to the hour" metrics end up just being junk.
2) If you aren't actually using the data, don't make people track their time "just in case". Or at least assign it a real cost, and say, "Is this data worth 2% of my payroll to me?" In poorly run companies, this tends to be a classic example of management wasting the employees time for no reason, just because someone said they were supposed to do time tracking but management never gets around to using the data for anything.
It's complicated by a couple of factors:
* nobody else at work would be using the same system (but we don't use anything anyway)
* I don't use emacs for mail, and haven't yet got it to talk to google calendar in a sensible fashion
* my elisp is about as good as any of my other lisps, which is practically nothing.
On the plus side:
* Evidence based scheduling - I'm a crap planner, and being able to compare estimates with reality would be the first step towards fixing it.
* I could stop making up arbitrary numbers of hours worked on a given project, and actually provide some evidence.[2]
* Formalising a workflow would help keep me on track when I'm not sure what needs doing next.
* Having a tracker/agenda/scheduler/outliner all together makes for some interesting integration potential.
[1] http://orgmode.org/ - outliner with all sorts of extra shineys for Emacs.
[2] Less unethical than it sounds - I'm basically subtracting out the time I spend faffing around on the internet. But I suspect I'm sometimes too generous with my subtractions.