The right kind of timesheets
Timesheets, now there's something I never thought I'd write favourably about! Those who have worked with me in a timesheet culture previously will have gathered that i'm not too keen on them. My opinions ranged from "waste of time", "they're all made up anyway" to "exist only to point a finger of blame" in truth, I absolutely hated timesheets. Turns out that me and timesheets got off to a bad start, I'd been forced to use the wrong sort of timesheet by those I previously worked with.
Earlier in the year while looking at how we could be more efficient and accurate in both managing/scheduling our time and costing jobs at work, the idea of using project management software was agreed on. As part of this, time tracking was built in on a project by project basis and we all decided to give it a go as a helpful indicator on how long tasks take to complete. My appreciation of timesheets started here.
It is still my opinion that general timesheets are not very useful and yes, i'd still resist using them. Project timesheets on the other hand, have proven to be very useful indeed. For clarity, I should probably explain what I mean.
What I'd class a general timesheet includes a block of time for your whole day, say 8 hours, broken down into hours or half hours or even 15 minute blocks where you log everything you do from the moment you take your coat off in the morning to the moment you put your coat back on again at the end of the day whereas a project timesheet only focusses on the tasks required to complete the job from start to finish and their duration runs for the entire length of the project. So for exaple when figuring out how long a job takes, or even how long a select part of a job takes, the information is right there rather than having to wade through days of irrelevent time entries for things like washing your hands or going to the shop and then collating the useful data into something sensible.
It's been an interesting and often eye opening experience over the relatively short period of time so far that I've been using these. The imediate benefit is being more aware of how long smaller, individual tasks really take. Longer term benefits include giving an overview of how many hours a whole job actualy takes and on a much longer timescale it is possible to average out how long certain types of jobs take, allowing you to quote accurately and honestly while also letting you see where you can be most profitable...which is nice for anyone in business to know really.
If you're not currently using project timesheets I'd encourage you to give it a shot, even if you do it by yourself on the work you do for your own record. It'll give you a valuable insight into how you work and how you should be charging jobs.
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