Timesheets without doing timesheets

I really, really hate doing timesheets. At the wonderful agency I worked at before co-founding William Joseph, I (along with my now business partner) were named and shamed as being the worst offenders for missing weeks (I think it may have been years!). I recall my ever-patient then boss, calmly explaining how important they were blah blah blah. The problem I had at the time, was that I was not only doing the work, I was also controlling the budgets — so I had a pretty good gauge on what we were billing vs overall time. So I felt it wasn’t really required apart from checking up on us. And that was the heart of the problem if I’m honest. I felt I was running an efficient, money-making team — but they still wanted to know what I was doing each day, hour by hour. I resented it.

With William Joseph, for 10 years or so, we’ve resisted any form of time-tracking. Most of the team had the same revulsion of time sheets. Over the years we’ve embraced progressive working practices and it just seemed rather regressive. We were small enough to have a feel for things and all believed in a more value-based charging model. However, as the team’s expertise has broadened and project size increased, it slowly became clear that we needed some way of knowing which areas were taking more time than others.

We wanted to avoid staff having to actually input what they did each day, and obviously we didn’t want to go down the spooky time-tracking software options out there (who would feel trusted knowing their activity on screen was being tracked!).

The solution was pleasingly simple. We were already using the excellent Teamweek for project planning. This involves us creating projects which corresponds to our own job numbers and everyone having a user profile. So as long as the time allocated in our planning matched time actually spent — all the data was already there in theory. However, Teamweek didn’t have (or planned) to allow you to view this data from within the product. So, we went about building our own.

As we already have to plan time, all we asked staff to do was to retrospectively mark that the task was done (a standard Teamweek function) and amend the time allocated if different to allocated. This served two purposes — it reified time being spent against allocated time and also made our scheduling more accurate as tasks not completed were easily spotted.

The dashboard we built shows every job (i.e project created in Teamweek) with a total of hours plus a split of each person’s time. All using the standard Teamweek API. Simple, but very effective.

Feel free to drop me a line if you use Teamweek and you’d like to have a go yourself — happy to share.