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

[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 :-)