Use Even the Smallest Opportunities to Record Work Hours

You have been working the whole morning, and when you look back, you have only a vague idea of what you did and what was accomplished. On top of that, you don’t have the slightest idea which cost center or project you could record the work hours to. Does that sound familiar? This feeling is well known to those of us who work in consulting companies that try to bill every hour — and with valid billing descriptions.

Personally, I’ve used the following principle and advocated it to my team members:

Use even the smallest opportunities to record work hours.

Let’s say you need to record work hours with half-hour precision. That means every half hour needs a project and a billing description. Your morning may be full of different activities: email conversations, phone calls, small project tasks, and chatting with colleagues. What should you do when it comes to time tracking? The answer is fairly obvious; the only real obstacle is our timidness.

You should record every five-minute opportunity when you find yourself working on a project with a clear time tracking code — and record it as 30 minutes of work.

What? Isn’t that cheating or taking advantage of clearly defined project tasks compared to more ambiguous ones?

No, it’s not. You’re not exaggerating your working hours. You’re not using it as an excuse for overly long coffee breaks. What you’re doing is working as a consultant in a company that requires every half hour to be recorded — and you’re complying with that requirement with as much effort and precision as you reasonably can.

When I find myself in a five-minute email conversation related to a specific project task, I almost feel relieved. It’s a chance to record 30 minutes of billable work with a valid description. The next 25 minutes may be a total mess, spent on other emails or answering colleagues’ questions. With a morning full of different activities, I only need to identify a few specific project tasks to record my time against. And inevitably, the projects that get billed will receive some unbilled attention from me at other times. In the long run, things tend to balance themselves out.