Grumpy Coworker

Month: January 2011

  • Can you really track your time in 15-minute increments?

    The beauty of Microsoft Project Web Access is overwhelming. You can now spend more time entering in a time for a task than it actually took to do it.

    I sincerely hope no one ever records 0.01 hours for their tasks, but even the “reasonable” limit of 15 minutes is excessive.  Assume that you are given a task:

    • 1 minute to receive the task through some automated process.
    • 2 minutes to start up whatever tool is required to do the task.
    • 2-3 minutes to focus your mind on that specific task.
    • Time actually taken on the task.
    • 1-3 minutes to report back the task as completed, send feedback to the client, etc…
    • 1 minute to record time spent on the task in your project tracking software [or note it for later recording]

    So, maybe you had 4-8 minutes to actually spend on the task?  I’m sure I’m forgetting plenty of other parts to the routine as well.

    What happens if the break room coffee pot is out of coffee during the day and you’re not a complete jerk and actually make some more?  How long does a bathroom break really take?  What about the occasional fire drill?

    I’d consider that the only 15-minute increments of time that I can track are interruptions from the task that I actually intended on focusing on–interruptions via email, instant message, phone…

    Of course, if you recorded a 15-minute block for every interruption during the day, would you run out of hours in the day?

    Also, how much time should you log for a  15-minute meeting?

  • What is this “merit increase” thing?

    Have you worked in a job at a time when people with your skill set was so in demand that people would throw you bags of money?  Did you notice that, come raise time, the barely competent among your peers received increases nearly twice the rate of inflation? At the same time, the superstars would receive about 1-2% more.

    Meanwhile, in less exuberant times, the superstars have to claw and scratch to keep pace with inflation.

    Sometimes, these pay raises are termed “merit increases”.  Many times, they’re not even cost-of-living adjustments.  In any case, if money was to be a motivating factor and effort required a demotivating factor, the employee who is doing barely enough to earn a “merit increase” is coming out ahead.

    If money isn’t supposed to be motivating, what’s the point of expending the effort to determine who should get what increase?  Just give a flat percentage or amount increase.  After all, all these calculations for who gets what result in a very small difference between employees, and can easily be seen by your superstars as a slight against them any way.

    Back to the “merit increase” terminology.  Can we just can call it a “random crap shoot budget allocation” increase, or maybe if you work for a less coddling organization, a “you’re lucky you have a job” increase?

  • 40 Non-Billable Billable Hours

    I understand that many professions have billable hours.  Lawyers, accountants, and consultants in general need a way of quantifying slices of time in order to request payment from their many clients.

    If you’re part of a business who primarily consults with clients, then I understand the direct link between logging time and receiving payment.

    However, if you’re part of an internal organization that performs a standard function servicing thousands of internal clients who in turn serve internal clients themselves, tracking and categorizing time may be splitting hairs and counterproductive.  Should a timesheet really take an hour to fill out?  Should we really break down what kind of work and who we did it for on a time sheet?

    Apparently filling in 40 hours per week is not acceptable effort in filling in the time sheet.  Are we really talking about “time sheet effort” or work hours here?  I don’t really consider it consequential that I worked 8.25 hours on Monday and 8.75 on Thursday.  If the purpose is to indicate when someone is working too many hours, I think it would be more important to actually talk to the employees directly.  If I’m feeling passionate about a particular project, if would feel that it’s counterproductive to tell me to stop work on it because I’ve worked too many hours.

    Also, how am I supposed to classify “making coffee” and “deleting 2 MB internal bulk email items”?  If we are to assume that 40 hours of productive time occurred, I’m not certain that there would be enough hours in the day to fill those.

    It’s also suspect that every week logged must be over 40 hours per week when hourly employees are not allowed to log 40.25 hours in a week without permission.  This indicates that it’s more a question of how much value [hours] the organization is getting out of an employee for the pay given.

  • Haiku on Following Through

    If you say you can,
    Why do you not follow through?
    You’ve wasted my time.