{"id":2733,"date":"2016-01-12T08:22:54","date_gmt":"2016-01-12T13:22:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/antipaucity.com\/?p=2733"},"modified":"2016-01-12T08:22:54","modified_gmt":"2016-01-12T13:22:54","slug":"time-tracking-is-broken-and-hours-makes-it-worse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/merikebi.warrenmyers.com\/?p=2733","title":{"rendered":"time tracking is broken – and “hours” makes it worse"},"content":{"rendered":"

This recent Medium post<\/a> irked me.<\/p>\n

It’s by one of the creators \/ operators \/ owners of Hours<\/a>, a “new” time-tracking and -reporting company.<\/p>\n

The intro had such promise, because it is so true:<\/p>\n

There is a reason why almost every time tracking service out there says it takes the pain out of time tracking. Time tracking stinks! For companies, unreliable time tracking is literally a multi-billion dollar a day problem. For employees, time tracking can be one of the worst parts of their job (hint: the two are related). You would think that by now someone would have come out with the ideal time tracking service that solves the fundamental problems.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But then Jeremy Olson<\/a> explains how Hours is supposed to be better – completely missing the point that time tracking sucks: everything he outlines is already being done in some form by current time-tracking tools.<\/p>\n

For billable work, such as what I do, a minimum billing increment is typically 1 hour. Which is stupid<\/a>. Weekly billing<\/a> for consulting<\/a> makes worlds<\/em> more sense – charging $187.50 per hour ($7,500 for 40 hours) plus travel and expenses is complicated (especially when T&E typically hit $2000-2500 every week (trust me, I’ve been doing<\/a> this<\/a> for most of a decade now)): charge $10,000 per week and be done with it. And, of course, that presumes you have the “discount” constant rate – you’re probably paying closer to $0.07\/second\u00a0(aka $250\/hr) for a mid-tier technical consultant, and as much as $0.14\/second ($500\/hr) for a management or principal consultant.<\/p>\n

$500\/hr for a full week (and we consultants do our darnedest to make sure all of our time is utilized (aka “billable”)) is $20,000 per week. When you’re at the point of buying consulting time measured in hundreds or thousands of hours (as most engagements I am involved with are), “saving” an hour here or there is not a savings – being billed for four consultants for a total of 158 hours in one calendar week is not\u00a0fundamentally<\/em> any different from being billed for 160 hours (aka 4 full work weeks) – it’s a 1.25% difference; at\u00a0most<\/em> it’s a “savings” of $1000, and probably closer to just $300 or $400.<\/p>\n

Even being billed for 38 hours from one consultant (plus T&E) is only a 5% savings over being billed for an entire week (plus T&E, so it’s probably more like a 2-3% savings, tops).<\/p>\n

The problem Hours sets out to solve is the wrong problem: while there are\u00a0some<\/em>\u00a0billable practitioners who truly need granular, partial-hour reckoning (lawyers working several “simple” actions at once, etc), the\u00a0vast<\/em> majority of salaried folks do\u00a0NOT<\/em><\/strong> need to track their time more granularly than by the half day, and more likely only by the day or week (indeed, I’d say most<\/em> salaried employees don’t really need to track their time at all – if they’re getting their work done, that\u00a0should<\/em> be all that matters)\u00a0– which tools like Harvest\u00a0<\/a>handle very nicely (and, btw, which have an excellent mobile interface (including for expense reports), which blows the theory Olson tries to promulgate out of the water when he says, “[i]t baffles me that most major time tracking companies don\u2019t invest more in mobile” – Harvest may not be a “mobile-first time tracking service”, but it is more than amply served in its mobile incarnation.<\/p>\n

Is there a market for time-tracking\u00a0outside<\/em> the work place? Sure. Things like the {{Pomodoro Technique}} use timers and tracking to help optimize your day. But\u00a0that<\/em> market doesn’t need yet-another-time-tracking-app – which is all Hours appears to be.<\/p>\n

What about the reporting end? I’ve seen reporting in Harvest, Footsteps, and many other tools – they all work (to a greater or lesser extent) the same, and they all produce relatively useful reports. Are Hours’ reports\u00a0really<\/em> “better”? Maybe – but it seems a tenuous claim to make, at best.<\/p>\n

It seems like the Hours team could’ve spent their time either\u00a0truly<\/em> making time-tracking better, faster, easier, and less-invasive (as described in the article, Hours makes time tracking\u00a0far\u00a0more<\/strong><\/em> invasive than it should be).<\/p>\n

But they didn’t.<\/p>\n

Shame.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This recent Medium post irked me. It’s by one of the creators \/ operators \/ owners of Hours, a “new” time-tracking and -reporting company. The intro had such promise, because it is so true: There is a reason why almost every time tracking service out there says it takes the pain out of time tracking. …
Continue reading time tracking is broken – and “hours” makes it worse<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_hide_featured_image":false,"_jetpack_featured_image_duplicate_dismissed":0,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[36],"tags":[141,771,807],"keyring_services":[],"class_list":["post-2733","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rant","tag-billability","tag-time","tag-utilization"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/merikebi.warrenmyers.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2733","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/merikebi.warrenmyers.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/merikebi.warrenmyers.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/merikebi.warrenmyers.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/merikebi.warrenmyers.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2733"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/merikebi.warrenmyers.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2733\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/merikebi.warrenmyers.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2733"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/merikebi.warrenmyers.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2733"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/merikebi.warrenmyers.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2733"},{"taxonomy":"keyring_services","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/merikebi.warrenmyers.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fkeyring_services&post=2733"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}