At one of my office jobs, we had a time tracker on our computers that was measuring the time spent at the office, and we needed to spend ~40h/week there. That tracker had a lot of issues, and later the company stopped using it.
At my previous (remote) job, we reported the hours spent on each task, but I was not tracking my time meticulously.
I've recently stumbled upon a Nebulab playbook where they describe pretty strict rules about the time tracking.
E.g. developers need to report separately:
- billable time (spent working on clients' projects)
- time spent on other tasks like 1:1s, studying, etc
- "wasted" time
- report if they worked more or less than 8 hours a day.
It seems like a convenient way to bill clients, but I suppose it can cause stress for the developers.
Personally, I see time tracking more as a personal productivity technique. I often use the Pomodoro and sometimes plan my day hour by hour, but always add some buffering time for context switching and unpredictable stuff.
And what are your thoughts on time tracking?
Top comments (37)
I've tried time tracking during work hours just to get a better sense of where my time goes but ultimately couldn't make a habit of it because it was frustrating to have another context-switching task. I also used to have the RescueTime extension (per @maestromac 's suggestion) but didn't find the data very useful so I turned it off.
I'm glad I've never had to do time track for an employer.
Yep, that definitely adds up to context switching. And I often forgot to pause/switch tasks 😬
I have tried RescueTime as well but it didn't stick.
My company doesn't require me to use time tracking, but I like to use it, so I know where my time goes. I love easy-to-use tools, and so far, I like to use task management software with time tracking. Todoist and Quire work best.
At the office, each employee is responsible for reporting its billing time on project they work. Usually, people use Toggl to keep track of billable time.
For my personal time management, I use pomodoro-tracker to make sure I take a pause every 25 mins.
I am in the early stages of building a solution for this problem for tracking time TimeLync.
I hadn't thought of some of the items listed such as "wasted time".
To me tracking time needs to be as simple as possible with minimal steps involved or else it becomes more of a hastle than it's worth even though it's extremely valuable to see time spent on a project. This is especially true when billing by the hour.
I'm hoping to refine my product into a useful tool for this very reason.
Very informative write-up thanks for sharing!
Good luck with your project! Simplicity is really important and lacking in many apps (not only time tracking ones but in general).
As for the "wasted time", I think the name is not perfect (though maybe ok in the work context). "Wasted" time is usually spent resting or miscellaneous tasks which is needed, so that time is not really wasted in my opinion.
Great points. Definitely taking all of this into consideration. Maybe user defined time buckets would be nice to separate these time categories simply 🤔
Hi Andrew, I'm working on a time tracker too. I think our products could partner. Please email me if you would like to talk shop. hello@yadafaber.com
Sounds great! I'm in the middle of a relocation but I'll reach out soon.
How is progress on TimeLync?
I generally have a repeatable daily flow that I do my tasks in, but I don't use a time tracker.
For the aspects of my role that are repeatable, I'll use my calendar to send me reminders, although I'm not always disciplined about timeboxing these tasks. 😅Still, I think this structure works pretty well for me.
Something different than time tracking that I like to use are weekly to-do lists. While it's obviously not concerned as much with managing small sections of time, it does help to keep me on task, let's me easily easy see the things I need to get done for the week, and marking items off the list helps me keep track of my accomplishments/let's me know what I've left to do.
Still, I can definitely see merits in tracking time to improve personal productivity! Honestly feeling like I might want to test this out.
I use a similar approach (especially in terms of discipline :). But still, having a structure definitely helps. I do timeboxing from time to time, and even when done like this, it's a useful exercise to see where the time goes and another reason to revise my schedule once in a while.
I use Toggl at work. It's not required but we like to track how long a story took to complete so management can better estimate how long it will take to build a feature and charge accordingly.
As for my home life, I use Toggl for my personal projects and 144blocks to help me understand how I should structure my time to get the things I want to do done.
144blocks looks cool, I'll check it out, though I wouldn't be able to use a tool like this on a regular basis.
my latest project, I estimated it that it will need around two years of dev efford and since we are only two devs on the project :P maybe i'll use time tracking to see whether i needed to buy a lottery or not.
I mean ok, if you are self employed and you feel you need to charge by the hour...its fine. But if you working at a company efford should not be calculated in units of time, but in units of efford (the only thing I agree with the agile idea).
I find the idea of counting time ridiculous.
I'm really bad at time tracking. In terms of health of the worker, I don't think it's helpful to have a time limit looming over people's head. I know I still remember the feeling of "Oh, almost the end of the day!" and my brain would immediately stop taking work seriously.
As for a personal productivity technique, I think it can be helpful! Also a big fan of Pomodoro, although I haven't used it in a while. For me, what it boils down to is just being honest with myself and deciding that "okay I should be doing work instead of
distracting-thing", or that setting reasonable time expectations for tasks.I use an app, Pomy for Mac, that tells me to look away for 20 seconds every 20 minutes. I try to get up and stretch during those 20 seconds to get the blood flowing.
Anyway, it also counts how many 20-minute blocks I did. At the end of the day, I just write that number down on my journal and reset the counter.
It’s as accurate as I can do, because I usually close my laptop when I step away for longer than a minute or two. It’s not meant to bill clients or anything like that, just for me to track how long I spent working or studying.
The nice thing about it being 20 minutes is that I can divide the daily number by three and get how many hours I worked precisely.
wakatime.com/dashboard anyone?
It does not require any user input, just tracks everytime you type into a compatible IDE.
You register it and forget about it.
It records only the coding time tho.
I use wakatime and love it. I have the chrome and terminal plugins for it too. With (more than) a little bit of config to all 3 I get a pretty good idea of where my time is spent. Still only tracking my time coding/working on an actual project but it's the best tool I've found for my role and time tracking requirements