Dear Ueno: How do you use time tracking for projects?

Dear Ueno is an advice column for people who for some weird reason think we know what we’re doing. Read more about all this, or check out our old advice.

From Eva Schipper, a designer in Seattle, via Twitter:

Dear Ueno,

How you use time tracking for client work, and how do you motivate teams to use it accurately?

Jessie Mizrahi, Senior Producer at Ueno NY, cheerfully answers:

Hi Eva — thanks for your question.

On the surface, tracking time is important because it tells someone how much to bill against projects. But that’s far from the whole story. For us, the real value of time tracking is in what it teaches us about how we work.

By logging and reviewing hours, we can learn from our patterns and make more precise estimates in the future. In turn, we are smarter with how we spend our days, better able to protect our team’s time, and ultimately supporting the best quality of the work. This makes us all happier people.

The formula: Hours = effort (not $)

We haven’t totally cracked time tracking, but over the years we have learned a few things. Here are some of them.

Setting it up

When we scope any new project, we estimate the distribution of hours and roles over time, with an associated projected level of effort for the asks.

Ideally, we will ask the team that will eventually do the work to also build the estimate. This gives everyone an active say in the process and the framework that will inform the hours.

Then we take the brief and translate it into a plan — proposing milestones and deliverables, with some flexibility for the unknowns, where possible.

Once a project is up and running, we regularly check our original estimates against the day-to-day realities, and most importantly, the best solution to the task at hand.

For now, we’re using Harvest to track time daily, but we’re always exploring additional tools. We like Harvest for the high-level snapshot, ease to scale up and down, invoicing, and its integration with Forecast, our resource management tool. But it could be better at task integration and providing complete in-flight project status.

Keeping it real

A team member will often ask their producer something like “do we have the budget for me to log the full day or should I log the rest of my time somewhere else?” While this is well-intended, it's super important for us to always log what's real (even if it hurts our margins).

The best practice is something like this:

• At the start of your week, check how much time you’re allocated for a task
• If it looks right based on what you know, proceed!
• If it looks too high or low, flag it and share your thinking. A producer will then work with you to either adjust the scope of the ask to the hours, add additional time to the task, or figure out efficiencies in workflow.
• Once you finish work for the day, enter the actual time it took.

As long as we’re communicating early and often, it’s best to enter what is true. Otherwise, we might think things take less or more time than they do, put that estimate forward again in the future, and create a cycle of stress.

Being clear (but not too granular)

There’s a line between providing clarity and over-engineering. Case in point: I once had a coworker who showed me her timesheet, where she had logged 15 minutes for “eating a burrito.”

Being too granular with time can give us the feeling of being monitored or like we’re doing something wrong if the hours don’t match the assignment. It’s important to be accurate, but balancing as you see fit is totally acceptable.

Part of this is also the granularity of time entry categories. Do we need to distinguish between design categories (e.g. concept, production, motion), or specific deliverables (e.g. brand strategy, Visual ID) within a project tracking tool? Sometimes yes, sometimes no — it depends on what we’re measuring.

It’s important that we’re intentional with the reasons why, sharing these with the team on the onset, and making sure we aren’t spending more time in the tool than we need to.

Being motivated

The time tracking tool is ideally an aid, not a chore. And logging hours is kind of like cleaning your room — it’s better to a little every day than to wait until you have a big mess.

The first step in motivating people to regularly log their hours is to remove a feeling of “right” and “wrong” entries. Just tell them to enter what’s true and flag when things aren’t lining up, and all will be well.

People are also more likely to enter their hours when they understand the tangible benefit. That means giving everyone visibility into estimates and actuals, and an active involvement in the planning process. When we build the hours as part of the project itself, it’s less of an admin item and more of a guideline for the process.

So, to answer your question…

• Involve the full team as part of the estimating and assessment process
• Encourage your teams to communicate early and often — there’s no “wrong” number of hours as long as we’re all in the loop
• Clearly convey any project-specific time-logging guidelines, but don’t sweat the tiny stuff
• Help everyone understand the why

Hope that helps,
— Jessie

Jessie Mizrahi is a Senior Producer at Ueno in New York. She kindly reminds you to log your hours.

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