Time blocking humans vs. humans tracking time
Why time blocking is a project manager’s dream.
Tracking hours sucks — big time. For one thing, I always forget to do it, and by the end of the week, I end up guessing and ball-parking the amount of hours I spent on my various projects. Some people are really good at it, and there are tons of great timer tools out there, like Harvest, that make it easier. I think it also works better for some disciplines than for others. I see time tracking working well for a developer, or a designer working on one project at a time. However, as a project manager juggling many projects at once, logging my hours as I go is the worst. There are days where I’ll be working on all of my projects in the same half hour. Updating that timer app every five minutes does not make sense for me. Updating my Snapchat story every five minutes is a way better use of my time.
A question remains: do people like tracking their time? Personally, it reminds me of punching in and out the clock. Not that there is anything wrong with on-the-clock jobs. It just brings me back to my teenage years making sandwiches at Subway. But I digress… We surveyed the Dynamo team a while back and the majority of us weren’t fans of logging our time. Shortly after that, we moved completely to time blocking and ditched the timers.
Blocks
For the majority of our projects, we now sell a percentage of “effort” from a team of handpicked humans (designers, front-end devs, back-end devs, UX and QA specialists) for a set amount of weeks. Let’s say we sell a three month retainer — this means we’re securing a few people for X hours per week for three months. Once that retainer contract is signed, I’ll take care of assigning time blocks to each team member for the upcoming contracted weeks. The client is guaranteed they are receiving the amount of hours they are paying for, and our team members have a better visibility over their amount of scheduled time blocks per project every week.
Up until recently, project managers at Dynamo would use a set of Google Spreadsheets to time-block for all projects. We would meet every Friday to go over resource allocation for the following week, making sure our blocks represented the status of each project’s life cycle. These Google Spreadsheets were then shared with everyone so they could all enjoy a visual representation of their time distribution for the week. It did the trick, but wasn’t looking super cute and left us limited functionality-wise. Sorry Google.
Floatin’
A couple months ago, we heard about Float. We’re still testing it out, but so far it looks like the scheduling app we’ve been waiting for. Float allows you to schedule blocks of time on various projects for each member on your team. You can make these blocks recur weekly, and book them weeks in advance. Not only is it a great tool to build your team’s schedule, the app also allows clear visibility over upcoming availabilities (whatever time has not been booked), which is key for healthy pipeline forecasting.
Float also has an awesome Reports section. You can keep track of availabilities for a set period of time, or for a department, or even for an ad-hoc team. It’s also a great way to double-check that you’re allocating the right amount of hours to all of your clients, every week.
Another interesting feature is the ability to assign a task to a block of time. So not only does the your developer or designer know which project they need to work on, but also, on what specific task, if needed. That’s what I call micro-management made easy.
We dig it
We came up with our own time-blocking system, which has been working quite well so far: we work with 2 blocks per day. A block of 3.5 hours in the morning, and another block of 3.5 hours in the afternoon. This means we allocate 10 blocks per team member on a regular week. For most of our projects, we can be flexible and let our humans choose which days they prefer working on specific client projects.
And what about me, you may ask? I’ll assign myself a block or two per project per week, depending on the scope of the work and my involvement. I might jump back and forth between multiple things all the time, but at least I’m accounting for these accumulated hours. Because PMs matter.
