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Comment by arethuza | Hacker News Reader

By "timetracking" do you mean getting people to record what they have been spending their time doing? Unless you are billing customers for time, why would you want to do that?

Far better in my opinion to focus on end results (feature X will be ready by date Y) than micromanaging progress by tracking time and assuming that this linearly corresponds to progress made.

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Obsessive metrics are fun.

Knowing how long things took vs estimates is useful for determining the accuracy future estimates.

Having an absolute sense of numbers for types of projects is useful for estimating future projects of similar scope; where by absolute I mean, not, "I think it took two weeks last time we did this".

For that kind of approach to work you'd have to be doing a lot of tasks/projects that are practically identical. I've never worked anywhere (from academic research, to startups to large companies) where any one "project" had enough commonality with others that this approach would generate any value - although I keep seeing generic PMs trying to apply it and failing over and over again.

Of course, it's a good idea to investigate why expected timescales differed from expectations - but IMHO detailed time recording isn't the way to do that.

Of course, YMMV.

When it comes to startups I'm not sure you can prioritise things like this over actually working on your product.

Also, if you're measuring and refining your estimates, they stop being 'estimates' and become something far less useful. If you have problems with estimates being inaccurate, try not estimating.

There are far more interesting metrics to measure rather than flogging a dead horse.

I agree - time tracking on a granualar level is very high friction and ends up being a waste of time. Better to focus on things that bring more ROI, like product.

Unless your billing on an hourly basis, chances are that counting hours is too much micromanagement.

This Joel On Software article is the best one I've seen on what Joel calls "Evidence Based Scheduling".

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/10/26.html

great stuff, thanks for the link

In some countries (like my own country, Norway), time-tracking is mandated by law for accounting purposes.

Seriously? Can you elaborate more on this? Why is it required by law and how to do it effectively?

I should have qualified my response, but I was running to a meeting at the time: It's not mandated by law for all companies, of course; that would be insane.

Time tracking is required for any company that bills clients by some unit of time (or bills another department within the same company for services, which is fairly common for large companies). Even if part of your workday is not related to external customers, once you are "tainted" by the time-tracking clause, you have to track all your work hours. For example, I myself work on a product as a developer, and only a small part of my time is spent directly servicing customers. Even so, all my work hours have to be logged.

I am allowed to log all my internal hours as one block if I want, but the manager guys like seeing how/where our time is spent, so they want us to log our work hours as finely grained as possible. We are a small 15-person company, so it feels a bit weird, but it's not a huge bother. We currently use Harvest, which is not a good app for managing a project, but is a very good app for invoicing.

The whole law is probably related to some EU directive, but I don't know the specifics.

Obviously this doesn't apply in Norway - but doesn't the EU working time directive require that, unless you opt out, your time has to be recorded so that it can be demonstrated you aren't being made to work more than 48 hours?

Of course, a lot of people simply opt out!

i didn't know about this, i'll look into it!

we finance ourselves with consulting, which is why it's important for us to track time

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