Author: Tommi Palomäki

There are many ways to keep track of time for project work and billing. Some people use notebooks or Excel sheets. Others rely on mobile apps or online timer services. For calendar-oriented people whose days are filled with meetings and working slots in between, using a calendar to track time entries is a solid option.

One obvious advantage of using a calendar for time tracking is how easy it becomes to visually spot your day’s time slots and see what you used them for. It’s also convenient to log the projects you’ve been working on, placing them right next to the meetings that already fill your day.

Personally, I’m a huge fan of the Outlook calendar. I use it to jot down all kinds of reminders and personal events in addition to work-related stuff. About 50% of my working time goes into online meetings. So whenever I start a piece of project work, I first create a calendar event for it. Only then do I dive into the task, knowing that when the next meeting interrupts me, my time tracking is already up to date.

There’s something I learned through my colleagues at work. They often wondered why my calendar always looked full, and why I seemed so busy. The reason? My calendar was filled with time tracking events and future reminders. To make myself appear less busy and more approachable, I started marking those time entries as Free using the Show As field in Outlook.

Outlook Calendar can work surprisingly well for time tracking. Even better, your calendar events can be automatically pulled into an ERP or PSA system (such as Workday or Agileday) as billable work entries. The calendar events don’t need to be perfectly organized or contain all the billing details. They’re just helpful cues to remind you what you’ve been working on. They make it easier for you — or for Timetabs — to fill in the rest of the time tracking details when it’s time to bill.

Most of us are familiar with Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and Augmented Reality (AR). Augmented Process Automation (APA) sits somewhere between the two.

Robotic Process Automation is a software robot, as the name suggests, that automatically processes information from existing IT systems. A typical example of RPA is handling applications and approving or rejecting them based on defined criteria. RPA can replace a lot of human work that follows repetitive, rule-based processes and involves one or more user interfaces for managing data.

Augmented Reality adds computer-generated content into the user experience in an interactive, real-time way. While AR shines in the gaming industry — Pokémon GO comes to mind — it’s also gaining ground in more traditional enterprises. For example, maintenance workers can follow live instructions or get remote support using AR.

Augmented Process Automation gives users a hand in working with multiple, complex IT systems. APA solutions consolidate information and present it in a user-friendly way. They can carry out complex actions on the user’s behalf by accessing several user interfaces at once. APA often uses Artificial Intelligence to generate smart suggestions for the user to consider.

At Taskey Solutions (the company behind Timetabs), we believe in the future of Augmented Process Automation. The world is full of disconnected systems with complicated user interfaces. Often, these systems hold related — or even overlapping — data that needs to be analyzed intelligently. Still, the final decisions must remain in the user’s hands. Take doctors, for example, who work with cumbersome patient systems, medical records, and electronic prescriptions. APA can boost their performance and make their work more meaningful.

Facing the Frustration

The ideas behind Timetabs AI-powered time tracking emerged over years of software consulting. There is a shared frustration experienced by countless consultants who grapple with the tedious task of meticulously recording their workday activities down to half-hour increments and ensuring accurate billing descriptions. This frustration is also shared by project managers tasked with reviewing these entries for accuracy and overseeing the broader project scope to prevent budget overruns. The problem in universal across consulting companies regardless of their ERP solution or their field of business.

Innovation and Piloting

The initial plans for a new time tracking innovation were born as a result of a Summer holiday hackathon event in 2022. The first prototypes emerged within weeks from that and within months the first teams started to record their work entries with Timetabs. The technical design and UX have undergone a few major evolutionary changes but the main concept has remained the same: offer a simple, intuitive automation solution tailored for the specific needs of consultants and project managers.

A major factor contributing to the success in development has been the ability to expand pilot testing to and receive feedback from dozens and then hundreds of consultants of a large Finnish software company. We started to solve a problem that we had firsthand experience of and ended up taking into account the experience of hundreds of our colleagues. The positive feedback during pilot testing hinted us of the market potential that is due to the gap between the usual time tracking approch and the everyday way of operations and project management in consulting companies.

Road Ahead

As of 2024, most of us still work part time for Taskey Solutions (company behind Timetabs). Albeit a small company, our team consists of seasoned software professionals and we strive for outstanding quality and customer happiness. Our vision is to streamline business processes through AI-driven automation and integrations. We have started revolutionizing the way consultants track their time and project managers review the hours. Later, we hope to advance to other business areas as well.

Once upon a time, my colleague stated that there are two precursors for a successful meeting:

1. A prepared agenda
2. Time tracking code

The latter precursor is particularly relevant in consulting companies where each hour must be recorded meticulously to the correct cost center, and preferably to one that can be billed from the customer.

How often have you been attending to a meeting only to subsequently spend your precious time and not so little social energy in trying to find the correct task and description for billing?

Every change starts with individuals. It has been over 10 years since I started to include a time tracking code in meeting invitations. Frankly, not always but often enough. My colleagues noticed the habit, and a few years later my team adopted it. A few years after that, it became standard practice to complain about meeting invitations that lacked time tracking instructions. Years later, we went a step further and developed a solution that used the time tracking codes from calendar meetings to automatically transfer them into our organization’s ERP system.

Having the time tracking instructions in meeting invitations is a time-saver, and more, a frustration saver.

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.

The modern working day is often full of context switches. They are caused by multiple meetings on different topics, emails, instant messages, and chats with teammates. Studies show that getting sidetracked by other tasks costs an average of 25 minutes before people can fully reorient themselves to the original task. Online meetings often take up all the reserved time — and then some. Isn’t it frustrating to end a meeting 20 minutes late, only to have a 10-minute break before the next one starts?

The problem of context switching raises an important question related to time tracking. This is especially relevant in consulting companies that track time with high precision in order to bill every time slot to the correct customer and project.

Where do you put the time spent on context switching when no direct progress is made for customers or projects?

For junior consultants, thinking about time lost to context switching can be stressful. Do you dare to record it as working time? And if so, which project should you assign it to? What description should you use? “Context switching” certainly doesn’t look good in billing details.

My advice to those who ask has always been straightforward. When a meeting takes one hour and 15 minutes, record one and a half hours for it. If you need a context switch and a short break after a 60-minute meeting, you can record 90 minutes with a clear conscience. It’s fine to allocate the time to the meeting task and use the meeting subject as the description, both before and after the meeting. After all, writing and cleaning up meeting notes counts as participating in the meeting from a time tracking perspective.

The same principle applies to other causes of context switching. Since context switching is usually tied to the tasks that come before and after it, it’s reasonable to record that time against those tasks as well.