Paint by hours, or how I solved for time tracking

Grant Shepert — Sat, 09 May 2026 08:38:46 +0000

Time entry. That tedious daily friction that provides value to somebody, somewhere, maybe, where nobody reads a single one of the "thing I did" descriptions you wrote.

What's worse, you then have to flip browser tabs to a different application to re-paste that same exact description onto the task you just booked hours on, then either manually update its status and/or nudge your PM so everything is properly, manually groomed.

Gaaah!

Put your hours to work

My solution: build a project planner with time tracking as first-class. We might talk in story points or Fibonacci numbers when weighing the effort of completing a task, but in the end it is hours that buy it.

In AbleTime, when time is tracked against a specific task like "CRM-232 Fix the login page", several things happen automatically.

If that task's state was "to-do", it is promoted to "doing" automatically.
Click the "done" toggle when you submit the entry and the task closes off neatly.
Entry description lifts from entry to task automatically, the whole lifecycle tied together in one place.

The task dashboard, one surface, everything together. Collapse/show lets you surface only what's important to you.

Now, the descriptions you put in your time entries aggregate as a coherent history of effort rather than a dissociated gaggle of tl;drs.

Paint-by-hours

The Kanban now reflects effort automatically, no drag or drop eating into your cycles. The "Timeline" Gantt bars snap into place as reality anchors your tasks.

The whole of it is designed to stay out of your way. You can draw your plan out by hand, dropping tasks onto the Timeline with estimated hours and day-blocked durations, or you can just leave the tasks to self-paint the board as the hours log.

Respect for gravity

Two other black boxes I wanted dealt with were Overhead and Backlog. The former, hours spent in standups, meetings, admin work, will invisibly bleed away capacity if ignored. Backlog is an even bigger capacity vacuum, a place where pre-work hides from the project's ROI. Both common and necessary, but dangerous if unaccounted for.

Overhead is your capacity equalizer. 6hrs of Backlog on the first task in the Epic. JPH-2 shifted 3 days ahead because of a dependency adjustment.

AbleTime puts both front and center. Overhead reads like an equalizer bar, weighted against the task-assigned hours. Backlog, if you choose to allow this particular sin, renders muted-but-visible on the Timeline. These signals, along with the color-coded "hours-spent" and ghost-bars that highlight dependency-shifted tasks, now all originate from the same simple act of tracking your time.

Time entry is a sin only if it's wasted on surveillance and billables. Put those hours to work.

If you have any questions, hit me up in the comments!

DEV Community: Grant Shepert

Paint by hours, or how I solved for time tracking

Put your hours to work

Paint-by-hours

Respect for gravity