General•How do you accurately track time when working on mutliple projects?

  • I'd like to know if anyone has successfully implemented a way for people to accurately track time when working on multiple projects at one time. I find myself working on 3-4 projects at one time and may spend 2 minutes here, 10 minutes there, 5 minutes on another etc. within a given hour. I've looked at a number of "timers" that let people click a start and stop bottom for each project every time they work on it. Sounds great in theory, but it requires people to remember to click start and stop every time. As soon as people forget, the timers become useless. Time sheets almost always become "an estimate of time" in these scenarios.

    Anyway, my question is: How do you accurately bill for time spent during production without creating an inflexible work structure?

  • I think the unique and most precise way to do it is to make a daily time sheet. Take the usual every day, before leaving work, to evaluate the time spent on each project. Other options, like "timers" at the end are more annoying than productive.

  • I added a page to the Wiki about an agile approach to digital production. There is a lot of room for improvement and it probably wouldn't work for any and all projects, but take a look and feel free to edit / comment / etc.

    http://stndrd.org/wiki/index.php?title=Agile_approach_to_digital_production

    Thanks

  • As a freelance producer, it's imperative I track my time accurately; I have to make sure I get paid for the work I do as well as make sure my hours don't go over budget. I have a timesheet that's both broken out by project and task (i.e. meeting, general, scoping, etc.). I try to update this everyday, however, should I fall behind, I find that looking at my calendar, my sent emails folder, and when documents were opened and modified, can be helpful.

    Beyond that, I have a list of the allotted hours per person. Weekly, I double check people's actual hours and keep a running tab in a spreadsheet. If we begin to experience scope creep, I can look at the actuals and determine whether we need a change order.

    Unfortunately, I think that tracking time is not an exact science. Clearly you need to have a moral compass and be motivated to track your time.

  • We've gone through a few systems in our time some bigger than we needed such as Replicons Web Timesheet - http://www.replicon.com/. We ditched this a few months back and moved back to our originally preferred choice of Basecamp. Being able to track time against to-do seems to be the best way. Likewise many of the team at Suburb find themselves working across multiple projects, some use Timepost http://www.timepost2.com/ which syncs with Basecamp - and works really well, as a designer/developer needs to tick off a task here, so clicking the clock icon and popping in the time takes mere seconds.

    I take your point about stop, start when using timer apps & widgets, and I agree with Quirine about motivation but organisation plays a part more than anything. We instigated the 'rulering' a form of corporal punishment involving a shatterproof ruler and some bare flesh for serial non time filling in offenders, but this has since been down graded as a punishment for anyone not replacing an archive DVD ;)

    Paper timesheets just never worked. Designers hate time sheets, it's like a form of torture on the whole to get them to fill them in, developers though, they're a different breed altogether and they're always neatly filled in.

  • I've been experimenting with creating project budgets based on duration for tasks, ie, design = 3 weeks, and % of resource available, ie. designer at 50%.

    Its been fairly successful in that it allows resources to just work and worry less about time management. Its also been nice because we can change direction within a duration without requiring addendums and sign-offs, etc. As long as we don't exceed the original duration, we can do whatever "Design" we want to do.

    Pros: Acknowledges that budgets are created at a time when we know the least about a project. Resources can worry less about time management and incremental billing. Allows for more flexibility as the project progresses.

    Cons: Difficult to get clients to agree to working this way. Becomes difficult to maintain when the project moves into maintenance mode and work is done sporadically. Doesn't usually jive with existing accounting systems.

  • Have no a lot of cash to buy some real estate? You should not worry, just because this is achievable to receive the personal loans to resolve such kind of problems. Therefore take a small business loan to buy all you need.

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