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State of timesheets, and why I fill them

Reading Time: 4 mins

When Mayank said “Anand, I’d like 85% compliance on timesheets,” I got to work, and built learn.gramener.com/timesheet to see what our compliance level was.

For the uninitiated — we fill timesheets into Teamwork. And this shows initiatives take more effort but produce less so we can improve those. If everyone fills 8 hours worth of time sheets a month, that’s 100% compliance.

In Feb 2019, our compliance level was 79%, i.e. we have only 6.2 hours of timesheets instead of 8. (In Jan 2019, it was 84%.)

We’ll talk about why this dipped. But before that, let’s talk about who’s working a lot.

People who need to get a life

Some people worked more than 10 hours a day — for the entire month of Feb!

I’m sure there’s a good reason, and all I can to these people is Shanth, Gadhadhari Bheem, Shanth! But maybe we need to get them some things to do outside of work.

The irony of my name on the list is not lost on me. But I have a reason. I filled my timesheets wrong. I was playing around with Excel uploads and duplicated all my entries. I only worked for about 7 hours a day. (And if any of the others on the list above have similar excuses, you’re welcome to comment below.)

Let’s talk about those who haven’t been filling timesheets. The list begins with L1.

People who need to start filling timesheets

So the next time your manager says “Have you filled in your timesheet”, a good response might be, “Oh, let me copy the project codes from your timesheet.” The discussion might end there.

But that’s not the real reason why our timesheet compliance dipped. The reason is that people stopped filling timesheets towards the end of Feb.

The graph here shows the daily entries of 20 people. The red circles show dates when they didn’t fill the timesheet. (White indicates filled. Blue indicates overworked.)

You can see that most people were filling timesheets in the first half of Feb, but stopped in the second half.

That’s understandable. Filling timesheets is boring. But the good part is it can help you figure out how you’re spending time.

For me, it’s even tougher. I have over 100 entries a week and it takes about an hour to enter them all (despite a fair bit of automation.) But that effort paid off. I now know how I’m spending my time.

  • Most of my time goes into the product. (Naveen has been telling me that I should be spending more time on the product. I showed him this, thinking he’d be happy. He smoothly shifted gears and said, “Oh, that means you should spend more time communicating about what you’re doing on the product.”)
  • This time is mostly spent on development, which is bad. Instead, I should be doing more reviews.
  • My next biggest bucket is internal activities — mostly “Org Initiatives”. What do I do there? Well, writing ESAR docs, interacting with new joiners, reviewing our performance appraisal process, analyzing the employee survey, … It’s a long list.
  • But I observe that I’ve been speaking a lot less externally (which is good), working more on the Media SBU (which I’m supposed to, so that’s good), and on Training (which I want to.)
  • My third largest bucket is sales. That mostly goes in client meetings — often in Singapore or Mumbai.

This gives me a sense of where I’m spending time effectively (org initiatives) and where I need to improve (more code review and product communication.)

That’s the real reason I continue to spend an hour a week filling timesheets. I know what I’m working on, and can improve on it. Better time management needs data. Fill it.

Anand S

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  • An interesting read. Sometimes I just fill timesheet for the sake of filling timesheet. It hardly takes me 10 minutes to fill for a week but I take it to be the most struggling 10 minutes of my entire week. Tricks like cloning the timesheet and uploading excel are good but they clone only the tasks. Filling the hours is another struggle in itself.

    What's necessary is necessary. I still have 80 pending hours to fill. Hopefully, I ll fill them soon and continue.

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