My employer wants me to do a time analysis so that we can see how much time I am spending with clients, how much on marketing, etc. As scary as it sounds, it’s for a good reason—I recently got promoted and we need to figure out which of my current projects need to be delegated to someone else.
Anyhow, has anyone done one of these before? Do you have a particular form/format that you favor? Anyplace online where I might get some suggestions or a template?
We do this at work and it’s the first job where I’ve had to log my time in such detail. I have had to punch into a time-clock before, but once I was physically present they didn’t pay too much attention to how many minutes were spent on project A versus project B. I don’t like having to do it, but from management’s point of view, I guess it really makes sense. They can see how many hours are billable and how many unbilled hours I spend surfing the internet. Any unbilled hours are billed back to the total costs of my projects, making my track record seem less efficient overall. Knowing this leads to me feeling the need to spend more time doing productive things when I have some down time, and less time goofing off/drinking coffee/etc.
It’s pretty decent. It has plenty of manual control (you can go back and change times by just typing over the project name. The interface is somewhat clunky and limited, but it does the job. I used to hate it a lot more, but then saw one of the suggested alternatives–a buggy, unstable online system with no easy manual control (so if you forget to punch in when you go to a meeting, you have to jump through a lot of hoops to correct the logged time). Now I’m just grateful that TraxTime is simple, stable, and easy to use.
I create a report for accounting every week by exporting to a disk file and checking off “daily” and “weekly” reports. The daily reports list the actual times and the weekly reports list my totals spent on each project or task for the week.
Thanks for both of your replies.
In this case, I think it’s actually going to be a help to do this, because I am trying to make the case that I have too many clients and not enough time to do the other tasks that my new position requires.
On first glance at my caseload, my boss agrees with me, but I’d like her to see where my time is really going.
Figure out what you are tracking and track appropriately. Don’t try to get more granular than 15 minutes.
I don’t know what sort of clients you have, but lets say you are a financial advisor. Your main duties are meeting with clients and managing your clients money. You have twelve.
You might have twelve client categories with two subcategories (or vice versa, two with twelve) one for meetings, one for dealing directly with your client accounts.
Then you have categories for all the other crap. Non client meetings, reasearch, travel time, each non-client based project gets a category. Non-work (i.e. took the afternoon off for Christmas shopping). The all important other for those times that you run to the bathroom, bump into a peer and get back to your desk half an hour later having heard all the details of her wedding.
Don’t try to get to 40 hours either - unless you are working 50. Try and be able to account for 90% of your time.