How do you track time?

Fred Oliveira on July 1, 2009, Comments (15)

Time tracking. So essential for project managers and teams around the world that we get several emails a day asking us to implement it. And, as we announced two days ago, we are! Time tracking is coming to Goplan soon, but before we roll out the new functionality we want to make sure it makes sense for the majority of our users. So, we’re collecting feedback from people who typically track time in their projects, either in order to bill clients or just to keep tabs on what is happening and how long each thing takes.

timetracking2

Do you use an application for time tracking, or plain old paper sheets? If you use an application, is it online or a desktop app? Do you do track it in real-time, or create a report every day/week/month? Does your organization have one person who keeps tabs on how long someone takes to do something, or does each person do it for themselves?

We’d love to hear from you. If you have any thoughts or requests on time-tracking, please leave a comment, or send us an email to support at goplanapp.com. Thanks!

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Comments:

At SpinWeb (www.spinweb.net), we don’t track time anymore. Rather than punish or award people based on how long something took we judge only by the result and whether it was done by the date it was required. :o)

At flexcode we use entp’s xtt - opensourced some months ago: http://github.com/entp/xtt/tree/master

I started using Mite (mite.yo.lk) a few days ago and I’m loving it. I think that tracking item on a per project, per “service” basis is quite important, especially if you telecommute or freelance, to help you judge pricing and time frames on future projects.

Having said that, the ability to track time based on a task could be useful! That would force me to be more effective and judge my productivity on a specific task, which will help any manager determine where each person is more productive, for example.

I don’t agree on using time sheets on a “you spent only 20hrs working on this project last week?”-type deal… It’s more of a reference, especially at an individual level. So, I’d like time tracking to be able to be hidden from any other users (even managers and admins) if I so desired. Again, I believe time tracking should be a personal thing, not a corporate policy.

One thing I ask of you is: *PLEASE* have a menubar app ready soon for this… Charge for it if you’d like (Mite doesn’t but there’s a commercial one available). Keep it simple, but it’s the only way I’ll ever keep track of time… :p

Thanks for opening up and asking for input! :)

I use Cashboard to track my time and for billing. It’s pretty handy with widgets for stopping and starting time for each task in our our estimates, it multiples it hourly when we publish the invoice. The downer is that they charge extra for multiple users which sucks! All we need to do is keep time!

As most creative businesses operate and bill for time, that needs to be kept in consideration at all times. Yeh I don’t agree for completely holding creative poeple to their time as that will squash their creativity. But if time is kept in mind throughout the process it helps the focus on the project and keeps the requirements in perspective.

If I were you on your side I would Create a little AIR App that runs in the task bar that does the following:

Log start and end times per task per project or the project on a whole.
Keep it neat and simple to avoid it becoming a hassle

Having worked for years and years as a consultant, time tracking simply became second nature due to the need of producing weekly timesheet of project/task allocation.

For over 3 years now I’ve been using OfficeTime (http://officetime.net), a desktop app with 1 killer feature for me: idle time detection!

It’s quite easy to kick start a timer when you sit down to work on a task but it’s much harder to stop it in a timely manner, specially on an hectic day. It’s those completely unrelated interruptions from clients, phone calls or even questions from teammates (that evolve into hour discussion re whatever) that eventually throw any time tracking activity into a burden and something that gets in the way.

OfficeTime simply asks me when I get back to the computer “You’ve been away for X minutes, what to do with that time? [subtract time] [keep counting] [track idle time as: ]“. It’s a simple thing but it does wonders in getting the tool out of the way.

Amongst other niceties I come to appreciate and depend on, I would simply highlight these 2:

- rounding rules: since I only need to produce *hourly* reports, a 30 min rounding granularity is enough to get a feel how the days went by (i.e. stop a timer at 37 min and it’ll just display 30 min spent but restart and it’ll resume counting from 37 min onwards)

- customizable reports: what good is it to record data if we cannot visualise it of product decent information out of it? every client has different requirements for granularity (consultancy, remember!) — some want daily totals aggregated by type of task; some just want total number of hours in a week; others just want to know how many working days! Any decent time tracking tool needs to help us produce reports/timesheets *in the client’s chosen format*!!!

Yes agree it’s great Goplan that you’re asking for feedback.

Currently I use Excel to maintain our team’s Work in Progress (WIP) task list. I record time estimated to complete tasks and would also like to record the time it actually took.

For me it would be good to record to within the minute but to fit Hugo’s requirements above perhaps the rounding error could be set in the user’s profile.

A few things I guess I would expect from it is to be able to edit timings that had been timed in the past, as what happens if you start timing a task and forget about it and then realise you’ve forgotten to stop the clock. Also I would like to be able to enter my timings manually for things I did retrospectively, i.e. I may do fieldwork and not log the time until I return to the office.

Finally if tasks could display how long time has been spent on them so far, any tasks that are in an overrun and a similar summing of all tasks to give a subtotal value for the milestones and the project itself would be great.

Just like Levi said: yolk is great!

To have time tracking integrated with invoicing, I’ve started using paymo.biz which is excellent too!

Keep it simple: choose project, choose task, start time, pause time, stop time. Nice little extra would be to edit the recorded time and enter time manually.

Would be neat to have this in an offline widget, which downloads projects and tasks, and uploads recorded time.

Pretty much like paymo.biz does ;)

Harvest.

I’ve tried a lot of different ones, like Harvest the best.

One thing I think is important, is that having time tracking integrated with the same system that creates invoices is somewhat crucial for me. I don’t want to have to transcribe time-sheets-to-invoices. If you don’t plan on including an invoicing aspect of the GoPlan system, perhaps you’ll include API linkage to invoice with our other apps?

Harvest / Blinksale / Freshbooks / Cashboard / Tick / etc.

We use the old and free version of Slife, which logs items in the background. I will generate a report if my clients request it. Mostly, hours worked on a service are included as line-items on our invoices. We round to 15 min. so most time-tracking is more detailed than we need.

[...] How do you track time? [...]

I don’t track time. I use an agile/scrum approach to PM. So tickets/stories are assigned to a week and they get done during that week.

No story should take longer than 1 week. No task (subtask of a story) should be longer an 1 day.

It’s usually simple enough to keep a team on track using these time boxes.

If I did use time tracking, I’d simply want it per project (worked on this for x hours). I know that if person A worked on project X for 8 hours this week that they should have completed their assigned stories/tasks for the week. If not I can help them figure out why not.

We use http://www.getharvest.com/

We use http://livetimer.com/ brilliant webapp and works with iPhone. And I love the feature “Timer that tracks start/end times (not just durations)”

I know I’m a little late to the game here… but I wanted to chime in and say that Freshbooks integration would be amazingly awesome.

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