Hi!

Recently, I had a nice talk with a friend of mine whom I haven’t seen for a couple of month. He’s a .NET developer, and has been very busy lately with several projects. So, we haven’t seen each other for quite a long time, and the first thing he did after saying hello to me, he started complaining about project time tracking. Not kidding! He started with not my beautiful eyes, or the way I looked, but the way he has to track the time he spends on projects.

The thing is, that the company he works at has recently changed the project time tracking system, so instead of weekly reports developers have to report their time spent on different tasks daily. So, a friend of mine was furious about it, saying that each day he had to enter his spent time into the timesheet, and this distracted him, he couldn’t concentrate blah-blah-blah… In other words, he was upset.

I, however, am convinced that project time tracking with a possibility to track time daily is much more convenient than weekly timesheets. Here’s why.

With weekly project time tracking you have to painfully recollect how much time exactly was spent on this or that task, or rather marking the time daily somewhere in a notepad in order to have exact numbers by the end of the week. And bear in mind, that accuracy is needed for right accounting and billing, and many other things. Though weekly time tracking seems easier to use, it’s a challenge, and a risky one.

While it may really seem distracting to enter you time in a timesheet daily, after each task or a part of a task fulfilled, you’re getting used to it in no time. The benefits of daily project time tracking are obvious, I think. Your time reports are accurate; you don’t have to bother memorizing all those exact numbers of hours and minutes. Project time tracking systems that suppose tracking time daily improve greatly project management, giving the responsible right and accurate information about the development in progress, tasks fulfilled and remaining, etc.

So, that was really a nice talk. =)