Low-Tech Time Tracking For the High-Tech World

To start, index cards are saving my vision. Bold statement, I know… But hear me out.

We’ve all heard it at one point or another, “Can you remember to put your time into XYZ? Thanks”. I hate that line. Personally, when I hear it I want to immediately turn around and scrape my eyes with a fork. It usually has nothing to do with the person asking the question, but instead the request itself. Time tracking has a very bad association in most people’s minds, and in general we have good reason to hate it.
For those of you lucky enough to not have to deal with time tracking, let me enlighten you. To go back to the good ol’ days of industry, employees would enter the factory, pick up their time card, and stamp it with the current time. As they were leaving “the office” they would punch it again with that time. This is particularly useful in jobs where the employees are paid hourly. You know exactly how long someone worked, assuming they worked for the entire period of time the were at the shop. The problem of time tracking is brought out of hourly salaries and into billable clients. What about situations where you charge clients hourly, half-hourly, etc… How is time tracking correctly managed here? There are a handful of solutions and most of them are horrid POS (pieces of software ;D). The UI makes little to zero sense, it’s clunky, and breaks half of the time you are using it. To get back on track, the software itself is designed to track the time you work on a project. Meaning, you enter in 1 or .5 and so on based on the time you spend on a task within a project. You do this for each project you work on, and everything in hunky dorry (don’t ask me to explain that). The time is then aggregated for everyone working on the project and an invoice is sent out to the client. Seems simple enough right?
Here is the fundamental problem. With what I said above in combination with, people are just farkin busy, most of us don’t have time on a project to project basis during the day to enter the time we spent into the system. So the accepted idea is that you should wait till the end of the day, and then log your time. In theory, thats great. It doesn’t work out. By the end of the day, all I want is to go home and have a beer. That and I’ve forgotten about time tracking, even though it is on my calendar for every day at 5:30PM. I have a lot of other things going on as do you I presume. The point is that I’m not going to enter my time during the day or even daily. But, that does not discount the validity of how important it is to accurately measure the time spent on projects. We need to be able to bill clients accurately, no?

The solution that has been working for me so far has been an incredibly low-tech solution. I’ve been using index cards. Moving back to that old paper and punch type of method, I’ve been able to more accurately record what I’ve been working on. This is good because it provides me more time to do other things. Before I had to trudge through my email and calendar appointments and then try to remember back about what I did on that day last week between X and Z… The idea of using index cards was presented by the president of the company I work for. We were discussing time tracking and how much our current system sucks and he mentioned that he had read about another company using this approach. I asked our office manager to grab me a set of those index cards that are bound together and tear away. He did so and it seems I’m usually far more billable than I used to be.

The process I use to track my time is this:

1. Start the day off by tearing off an index card.
2. Flip the card over and write the date on it.
3. Take the card with me wherever I go (meetings or otherwise). This works because it’s so small it can fit in my pocket or I can carry it as if it were a page in my notepad.
4. Whenever I remember or think of it, I write down the task and the time associated with that task.

This process, on a daily basis allows me to more accurately gauge how long it is taking me to do tasks within projects and to more accurately bill my time. When Monday morning comes, I can spend 15 minutes dumping the time I’ve already collected into the time tracking application rather than an hour fighting with email and calendars. Also, it reduces the number of times I have to actually enter that god forsaken time tracking application.

Therefore my initial line stands; index cards (and sanity) are preventing me from stabbing myself in the eye with a fork. Happy tracking.