Timesheet tracking
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Where I work uses a timesheet tracker (Workday, if that helps) to help management track utilization rates per department (among other things, I'm sure) down to 15 minute increments. Everything has to be manually added, and no two weeks are close enough to the same to make it worth copying a previous week's work and modifying it.
My problem is keeping track of my own work so I can enter it in the tracker. I have work that I've done spread across Outlook (meetings on the calendar and miscellaneous email and chat logs), our helpdesk's tracker (tasks shunted to my team), our internal/maintenance request tracker (for configuration changes to our clients' instances), and our data change request tracker (for updates to our clients' production data), and our documentation folders for each client.
For those of you who have or have had similar timesheet tracking issues, how do/did you manage to keep up with everything and have it all entered and submitted each week? I'm pressed for time as it is with all the stuff on my plate with urgent client requests that need fixed now and trying to keep up with all the rest of my job (and other, life) responsibilities.
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@djls45 I recently started using http://www.manictime.com/. I haven't been using it for long yet, but so far it is really useful. Basically, it tracks your active windows over time, so you can see which application you were using when and for how long. There are some other features as well (screenshots, etc.), but the "active window" functionality is sufficient for my purposes
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@Vault_Dweller said in Timesheet tracking:
Basically, it tracks your active windows over time
Chome: what.thedailywtf.com:6 hours
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@Jaloopa You mean like this?
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@Jaloopa said in Timesheet tracking:
@Vault_Dweller said in Timesheet tracking:
Basically, it tracks your active windows over time
Chome: what.thedailywtf.com:6 hours
Basically why I stopped using that app ...
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@djls45 said in Timesheet tracking:
how do/did you manage to keep up with everything and have it all entered and submitted each week?
I use a google spreadsheet, so I can add and remove lines with a couple clicks. Just dump time in there every few hours throughout the day. That saves me from trying to figure out which billling categories which work goes under -- sometimes multiple lines get summed into the same thing at the end of the week, and so on.
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LIE
Pretty much everyone does it. 9.30am Monday morning at a very large gambling firm was known as "Timesheet Forgery Hour."
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@djls45 Personally I use org-mode in emacs, but then I already use emacs for practically everything anyway.
Consider:
* A Task ** A subtask :LOGBOOK: CLOCK: [2017-04-10 Mon 07:45]--[2017-04-10 Mon 13:09] => 5:24 CLOCK: [2017-04-04 Tue 12:58]--[2017-04-04 Tue 15:00] => 2:02 :END: Any notes I need to keep on the subtask. BTW, the logbook entries above are auto-generated, all I need to remember to do is to clock in and clock out of the task. * Another main task Here's a clock-table that extracts how much I've been working on different sub-tasks. I can get this for relative times, such as lastweek, lastmonth, and for different subtrees or the entire file, as I see fit. Rather than creating something for you, I just paste the clocktable for a course I've designed and am now giving. All I needed to do for this was to write the #+BEGIN-line. #+BEGIN: clocktable :maxlevel 3 :scope subtree :tstart "<2016-08-01>" :tend "<now>" #+CAPTION: Clock summary at [2017-04-10 Mon 13:24] | Headline | Time | | | |--------------------------------------------+----------+--------+--------| | *Total time* | *258:56* | | | |--------------------------------------------+----------+--------+--------| | __ TODO [#A] PA1415, PA1434, PA145,... | | 258:56 | | | ____ Lectures | | | 29:14 | | ____ TODO Plan VT2017 | | | 166:13 | | ____ DONE Planera Arbetsinsats 2017 | | | 4:36 | | ____ TODO Datorbaserad Tenta | | | 2:18 | | ____ DONE Exempel för Use Case Extends | | | 0:29 | | ____ DONE Git for Beginners | | | 4:57 | | ____ DONE Submission Folders | | | 0:29 | | ____ DONE KursPM | | | 2:01 | | ____ DONE Plan Assignments and Submissions | | | 2:54 | | ____ DONE Plan Lectures vs Sprints | | | 5:14 | | ____ TODO Infrastructure | | | 3:09 | | ____ DONE Export site | | | 4:16 | | ____ DONE Phrase Book | | | 0:48 | | ____ DONE PA1443 Introduktion till... | | | 1:11 | | ____ DONE CDIO Statement | | | 5:04 | | ____ -------------------- VT 2016... | | | 23:02 | #+END:
But then you would have emacs on you.
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@Mikael_Svahnberg said in Timesheet tracking:
But then you would have emacs on you.
HISSSSSSSSSSS! FILTHY HEATHEN! GIVE ME VIM OR GIVE ME DEATH!
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@accalia said in Timesheet tracking:
GIVE ME VIM OR GIVE ME DEATH
That's quite the dilemma. On the one hand, an eternal existence of nothingness, with no hope of ever returning to the land of the living. On the other hand, death
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@accalia said in Timesheet tracking:
@Mikael_Svahnberg said in Timesheet tracking:
But then you would have emacs on you.
HISSSSSSSSSSS! FILTHY HEATHEN! GIVE ME VIM OR GIVE ME DEATH!
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@Jaloopa said in Timesheet tracking:
@accalia said in Timesheet tracking:
GIVE ME VIM OR GIVE ME DEATH
That's quite the dilemma. On the one hand, an eternal existence of nothingness, with no hope of ever returning to the land of the living. On the other hand, death
i said give me VIM, not give me Emacs.
Vim is Life! Vim is Adventure!
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Don't forget to include the time it takes to keep the timesheets up to date.
I usually allocate an hour under admin tasks with the note filling out timesheets.
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@accalia said in Timesheet tracking:
i said give me VIM, not give me Emacs
From where I'm standing (the modern world, where GUIs exist), there's very little difference
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@accalia said in Timesheet tracking:
GIVE ME VIM OR GIVE ME DEATH!
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@Jaloopa said in Timesheet tracking:
@accalia said in Timesheet tracking:
i said give me VIM, not give me Emacs
From where I'm standing (the modern world, where GUIs exist), there's very little difference
those who forget the lessons of the past are doomed to repeat them.
even today I do not require a mouse in order to be effective at my jorb. It is a tool that i use, and use to great effect, but i can do much of my job better, faster, and more efficiently without it.
so NYA!
:-P
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@Jaloopa said in Timesheet tracking:
@accalia said in Timesheet tracking:
i said give me VIM, not give me Emacs
From where I'm standing (the modern world, where GUIs exist), there's very little difference
They are within a rounding error of being the same.
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@accalia said in Timesheet tracking:
even today I do not require a mouse in order to be effective at my jorb. It is a tool that i use, and use to great effect, but i can do much of my job better, faster, and more efficiently without it.
How many kids have you told to get off your lawn today? :P
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@RaceProUK Only the ones she didn't throw s at
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@accalia said in Timesheet tracking:
but i can do much of my job better, faster, and more efficiently and with more spellar mistakes without it.
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@RaceProUK said in Timesheet tracking:
@accalia said in Timesheet tracking:
even today I do not require a mouse in order to be effective at my jorb. It is a tool that i use, and use to great effect, but i can do much of my job better, faster, and more efficiently without it.
How many kids have you told to get off your lawn today? :P
seventy two point three
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@Luhmann said in Timesheet tracking:
@accalia said in Timesheet tracking:
but i can do much of my job better, faster, and more efficiently and with more spellar mistakes without it.
you think typing with a mouse is going to cause less spellar errors?
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@accalia said in Timesheet tracking:
seventy two
That bit's fine
@accalia said in Timesheet tracking:
point three
That bit worries me: how did you end up with 0.3 of a kid on your lawn?
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trust me, you don't want to know. also, do be a deer and call ahead if you want to visit, i wouldn't want the automaim masers and diamond lattice killoforce fields to accidentally harm you if they get a false positive and consider you sufficiently childish to need to be removed from my lawn.
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@RaceProUK said in Timesheet tracking:
how did you end up with 0.3 of a kid on your lawn?
The more concerning question is what she did with the other 0.7.
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@accalia said in Timesheet tracking:
you think typing with a mouse is going to cause less spellar errors?
it will presumably go a lot slower ... so yes.
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@RaceProUK said in Timesheet tracking:
how did you end up with 0.3 of a kid on your lawn?
A not-quite-3-months-pregnant woman?
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@Luhmann said in Timesheet tracking:
@accalia said in Timesheet tracking:
you think typing with a mouse is going to cause less spellar errors?
it will presumably go a lot slower ... so yes.
so, sacrifice effectiveness for accuracy...... yeah i don't think that tradeoff is worth it.
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@accalia said in Timesheet tracking:
do be a deer
Why do I have to be a deer? I much prefer being a hedgehog.
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@RaceProUK well...... just don't say i didn't warn you.
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@accalia said in Timesheet tracking:
@Mikael_Svahnberg said in Timesheet tracking:
But then you would have emacs on you.
HISSSSSSSSSSS! FILTHY HEATHEN! GIVE ME VIM OR GIVE ME DEATH!
Out of interest... How does one inclined to creative spellaring manage to use vim and not horribly mangle whatever they're working on while in "normal" mode?
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@accalia said in Timesheet tracking:
you think typing with a mouse is going to cause
lessfewer spellar errors?Filed under: It might help with the gramm
ear though
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@accalia I know a developer. VIM broke his hands. No thanks.
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@lucas1 said in Timesheet tracking:
@accalia I know a developer. VIM broke his hands. No thanks.
VIM. Not even once
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@RaceProUK said in Timesheet tracking:
That bit worries me: how did you end up with 0.3 of a kid on your lawn?
Kid has one foot mostly on the lawn, the other entirely on the pavement.
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@Jaloopa I use it only because a decent command line editor for windows isn't included.
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@djls45 At my first job they were silly about timesheets. First "log everything", then "log up to 40", then "log everything" again.
My main strategy was to keep a separate notebook and jot down what i was doing. If I used my main notebook I'd have to flip around to find everything. It was a bit easier because the categories were fairly coarse (initial dev, bugfixes, etc). All I really had to track was project+phase. Separate line items for things like team meetings, etc. Annoying, but not that bad.
Sucked for our support dev team since they would also have to track by customer. So depending on how many tickets one worked on, your weekly timesheet would be a bit crazy.
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Timesheets are pointless unless you are charging a client hourly or daily and management know this.
BTW Simon actually committed suicide (not because of David Thorne) so RIP Simon
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@homoBalkanus said in Timesheet tracking:
@accalia said in Timesheet tracking:
@Mikael_Svahnberg said in Timesheet tracking:
But then you would have emacs on you.
HISSSSSSSSSSS! FILTHY HEATHEN! GIVE ME VIM OR GIVE ME DEATH!
Out of interest... How does one inclined to creative spellaring manage to use vim and not horribly mangle whatever they're working on while in "normal" mode?
veeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeery carefully.
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@djls45 Don't even fucking get me started with Timesheeting.
Granted I don't have to do any hourly/minute bullshit but still.
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The simplest solution is to LIE.
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@lucas1
Right up until your boss man decides the simplest solution is to get rid of the guy who generates most of the customer billing complaints over inaccurate timesheet entries.Though I suppose that does rather permanently solve your timesheet problem.
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@izzion
Sorry mate but you dunno how it works. A client is quoted an estimate before the contract is signed. It is very rare that clients will allow you to charge hourly. This goes up to big corps as well(I've seen lots of papers left on my desk as I used to sit next to one of the Directors) on how much they are charged by smaller companies.Also if you aren't working for a client and are an internal developer. It won't matter at all unless your boss is a tool.
BTW I had a real crisis of conscience a few years back when some papers were left on my desk telling me a whole office was going to be cleared out.
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@lucas1
I will be sure to tell my boss man that all the hourly contracts we sign are totally invalid because that's not how it works...
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@izzion There are always exceptions to the rule. Your company has an uneconomic billing system. That doesn't mean that the vast majority is incorrect.
Generally most employees will make guestimates on the amount of time spent on a particular tasks, normally in 1/4 day increments. Anything more granular than that is ridiculous and will be inaccurate unless you are running a call centre of sweatshop.
EDIT: I changed this as I my sentence structure was shite and probably still is.
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@lucas1 My company has two parts to our contracts. We have a flat billing fee for deploying and customizing an instance for a client (scaled by the complexity they need), and we have an hourly billing rate for maintenance work. Management wants quarter-hour listings of our time.
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@djls45 Work somewhere else. That is quite frankly ridiculous.
Not to be too graphic. But I solved the reason why a particular Angular 2 module wasn't working in IE while taking a dump and the only thing I was really thinking about at the time was relieving myself.
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I do timesheets, both for internal tracking and for reporting to our funders.
The internal tracking system cares at about the level of days and whole projects, so it is easy to be “accurate”. The one to funders is annoying because it gets audited. (Like it makes much of a difference…) Fortunately, it also doesn't really want enormous detail, and only needs to be submitted every few months.