I'm curious if anyone here has had success with more "coarsely grained" time tracking?
I've found that I'd have no issues tracking my time by day or at most half-day increments, especially since for the most part that's how I end up working on things in a lot of cases (as a developer, not a manager).
I feel like it would give most of the same benefits with a magnitude less work, but I haven't ever tried it out in a real situation before and I'm curious if it holds up.
I've had mixed results with more coarsely grained time tracking. On the one hand I'm more likely to actually do so when I don't have to clock in and out all the time. On the other hand, I kept forgetting to clock in or out because it wasn't 'regular' enough to do it automatically.
These days I use Emacs org-mode for todo items and time tracking (+ pretty much everything else), which makes it much easier to be extremely granular in my tracking without having to expend much effort. Since I have my todo list in front of me for any task anyways, starting the clock is just one keystroke away.
That said, I try to keep myself from calculating how much time I 'need' to save to offset the time it took me to get everything set up and to get comfortable with Emacs/Org-Mode ;).
> That said, I try to keep myself from calculating how much time I 'need' to save to offset the time it took me to get everything set up and to get comfortable with Emacs/Org-Mode ;).
Between increased efficiency, less proverbial papercuts from alternative ways of doing things to cause your death, and things you just didn't do before you reduced your friction, switching to Emacs/Org-Mode has probably paid for itself many times over :).
I've had great success tracking my team, and my team's time, by the day. On the level of "I'm working on project A, project A is now done and I'm now working on project B." It's obviously imperfect but it's good enough to prevent the edge cases, e.g. somebody spending a month on something low priority.
I only care about coarse grained time tracking on my team. I estimate to the quarter day at the smallest, if any task is smaller than that, it shouldn't be a separate WBS item. After all, my end-of-year bean-counter statistics are all based on person days anyways, and I'm not a consultant, so why would I care about tracking to the 15 minute increment?
I was thinking the same thing about 72 hours ago, I mean 3 days ago. In certain fields, like filmmaking, freelancers don't charge by the hour. They have a day rate. You pay them for the whole day or not at all. Some let you hire them for half a day.
I've found that I'd have no issues tracking my time by day or at most half-day increments, especially since for the most part that's how I end up working on things in a lot of cases (as a developer, not a manager).
I feel like it would give most of the same benefits with a magnitude less work, but I haven't ever tried it out in a real situation before and I'm curious if it holds up.