What are your thoughts on tracking time at work?

Question

I&rsquo;ve just started a new job and during the on-boarding I learning that management expects a 15min accuracy on logged time in JIRA tickets. This includes meetings so tracking 15min for stand up every morning in a big shared story is something everyone here does. I feel like I would be able to adapt to it if the interval was 1 day or similar. Having every quarter-hour be accountable to my manager seems somehow untrusting. I&rsquo;ve mentioned it to a direct manager, and the reasoning is that 15min/day over the course of a year is a large cost, and tracking ops time vs product time is something they find valuable&hellip; and that makes sense to me, but I can&rsquo;t seem to shake whatever red flags this is flying in my head.Most places I&rsquo;ve worked at have tracked points, which still relate to time in a way, but are large enough to account for bad estimates, by design. I feel like I&rsquo;m going to flounder here in the transition to 15min increments.Where&rsquo;s the sweet spot in your opinion? Is there a way to do time tracking and/or estimates that doesn&rsquo;t feel &laquo; untrusting &raquo;?

jiraistheworst · Accepted Answer

I'd quit. Not like rage quit, but I'd start looking for a new job. This demonstrates (best case) that the "business" side of the organization does not trust IT. Worst case, this shows your manager doesn't trust you.Unfortunately, I think this is very common. I've quit two jobs over it. One of those jobs I was the manager over four developers and I fought it for over a year. I told my director it didn't make sense. I told my developers not to do it. But eventually the constant fighting over it made me quit.

muzani · Answer

I've done it for personal productivity tracking and I hate it because it throws me out of flow all the time. What I've learned was the days I got nothing done are the days that I tracked time.I would recommend the Pomodoro system if you do so. The full thing, not just the 25+5 minute, but also the day by day planning.

tacostakohashi · Answer

You may find that your company just needs plausible numbers for accounting purposes to allocate back to different budgeted projects, or capital vs operating expense, and you can just fill in approximate numbers at the end of the week, or copy the same numbers from one day to the next, one week to the next, etc.

aynyc · Answer

Do you actually have to log every 15 minutes during work or you can log the time at the end of the day that accounts for every 15 minutes? I used to have a script that basically just fill out timesheets.

gardenhedge · Answer

So in reality what does this look like?15 min - standup15 min - standup runover15 min - open ide and find the bug I was working on15 min - thinking about bug15 min - looking at unit tests15 min - refactoring code..lol

m01 · Answer

Does your company bill clients based on time spent on projects?

bdavis__ · Answer

if you work for a defense contractor, it's every 6 minutes (tenths of an hour)