Pants on fire

[threemonkeys]

After many years of the luxury of not having to fill out timesheets, we now have to suffer that pain. It isn't the filling out of the numbers - it is the working out of how to code your time.

When it comes down to it, timesheets make liars of us all. Yes liars. If you spend some time discussing the latest news of the day or, say, the distinctive features of lake Baikal, then how do you code it? Even if you have a code for idle chitchat (which you won't), you will not use it. You will code it as admin or project planning or some such. In other word, you lie. In fact you are encouraged to tell lies.

Corporate morality - *sigh*

Comments

[mashugenah.livejournal.com]

I fond the converse. Filling out a timesheet made me lok a lot closer at what I was actually doing. And when a bill was sent out to a client, I could look back and say what it was I actually did, and how long it actually took. Even allowing for some chit-chat time, it worked out more accurate and hence truthful...

but they can be a pain, I know.

[threemonkeys.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't be grumbling so much if the info was aimed at a client billing situation (as it has been in my previous jobs), but it is all just an internal tracking exercise that has been imposed on us.

It does not help that my current job is pretty fuzzy in terms of who I'm working for and with lots of overlapping duties and things being done in parallel. It may sound messy, but in this particular role I'm convinced that it is more productive that compartmentalising everything.

[stephanie-pegg.livejournal.com]

I once went to a short course on project management at which I was told to never ever ask a worker what percent done they are on a job. They won't know, which means they'll have to make something up, which will put them in the bad mental space of feeling like they're lying. Much better, the lecturer said, to ask them how much longer they had to go which is an estimate that people generally feel happier about making.

[threemonkeys.livejournal.com]

never ever ask a worker what percent done they are on a job.

I agree - I experienced that problem in my days as a project manager. A role I plan never to reprise.

[lobelet.livejournal.com]

Once I worked for a consultancy company who no longer exist (I wonder why?) and I was required to fill in timesheets and account for my time in units of 6 minutes, on the grounds that there are 10 of them in an hour and therefore we were working in easily computable decimal numbers. It made the mental (as in deranged) arithmetic easier.

Have you ever tried to break tasks down into 6 minute intervals?

I invoke Disraeli -- lies, damn lies and statistics. As far as I am concerned, when I worked for that company, these were all synonyms. God help the clients who got the bills based on them.

[threemonkeys.livejournal.com]

Have you ever tried to break tasks down into 6 minute intervals?

Yes. It was easier once I learned to forget about 6 minutes and start to think in 0.1 units of an hour - "oh I think I did about 2.3 hours on that yesterday". It was an easier lie :-)