Documenting every minute of your day

Do any of you have to do this? I basically work for a break/fix. Number of clients*call volume/engineers = hours available to do work. I am salary so I do work 8-5 no matter what. We have a system where we literally have to document every minute of our day. Drove to a client? Document. Work done on site or remotely? Document. I get that but sometimes we have downtime....hours of downtime sometimes and it is gotten to a point to where if your whole day is not filled up with either billable work + admin work it is your fault. There are just some slow days. Studying is not an option either. The engineers are not responsible for client acquisition or sales. We service home business owners and small businesses if anyone was wondering.
Just curious if anyone else has to do this or has been at a company where they do this. Or, any other thoughts.
PS: Today is one of those days. I had an hour long meeting about how I did not bill enough on one specific day a few weeks ago.
Just curious if anyone else has to do this or has been at a company where they do this. Or, any other thoughts.
PS: Today is one of those days. I had an hour long meeting about how I did not bill enough on one specific day a few weeks ago.
Comments
Not a good way to go through life.
This is what we all used to do but we cannot do this anymore. We have to document it to the minute. They have said if your whole day ends in a 5 or a 0 you weren't really doing the actual activity that whole time.
'My dear you are ugly, but tomorrow I shall be sober and you will still be ugly' Winston Churchil
They say they're putting in x amount of hours or working on this or that but they really are not and I figured it out when the techs who claimed the most overtime actually had tickets sitting in their bin for weeks, with no updates/resolution
Good way of collecting a check, do the bare minimum, get paid overtime.. I should have learned from them..
Yup. Like today, is almost all day of nothing. I pretty much have to make things up that I did for 6 + hours. If anyone asks, I do my due diligence to get work. We are supposed to send out emails saying we are available for work. I also follow up with my team lead to ask if he has anything for me and warn him that it is a slow day.
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When I went purely BAU in Networking I just had to put 100% of my time to the unit I worked in as it was BAU support cost that was recovered from all customers depending on what they were willing to pay for.
At my present role I don't have to do anything like that because I work for a single group of two companies (and it's all the same)
I've been working on imaging some old 3750's all day and I'm not done. It's the same image we have in our production network in a couple closets and I've uploaded it to TFTP, yet it won't download to the switch at my desk the switch says its the wrong version of software......
I use to have to do that when I worked landscaping so we could bill our clients for hours worked. The boss said when I get paid, you get paid. What that turned into is we didn't get paid driving site to site, or lunch etc. Just paid for actual on customer site time. Usually ended up getting ripped off about an hour and a half or two a day.
I have actually almost volunteered to only get paid for what I do and travel time in exchange for not having to document my time 1 or 2 days out of the week.
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The company wants us 80-90% billable. It can be a pain but that's how we all bill the clients.
Then you have guys who bill 45 minutes for a pw reset lol
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Been trying for months.
Not as extreme but I do document my time similar to this. I just make sure it is work related.
Another thing you guys might like. Since I live 45 minutes away from the office, I have to deduct 45 minutes out of my day if I leave after 8 AM to go to a client even if that client is on the opposite side of town from the office. Their logic is that if I am driving after 8 AM and not coming to the office first I am technically "not working." A lot of our clients can't meet until 9 AM or after so let's say I work a whole normal day. With this logic, I technically only have 7.15 hours out of 8.00. It has become maddening.
Eventually, I was let go because I wasn't billable enough. I would never work at an MSP again. Non-billable means no job.
'My dear you are ugly, but tomorrow I shall be sober and you will still be ugly' Winston Churchil
Except if you were in a car accident you are on company business and thus on company time. If you're hourly they can get in a whole crapton of trouble for doing that. Depending on how infuriating this is, it may be worth a call to the labor board. Anonymously, if you will.
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As far as not being compensated while driving to a customer's site, this gets really complicated. As a general rule of thumb, any time spent traveling between job sites after the first job site is compensable time, even if it's not billable for the employer, so the person who posted earlier about his/her landscaping job was definitely getting shafted by their boss/owner of the company.
As far as going to a client's site first instead of your work place first, I think your employer might be breaking some labor laws by not paying you that time. You might want to look into the Department of Labor's guides and your own state's labor website to find out if they are screwing you over.
I had one guy bill 32 hours per week for "backing up the AD database, checking replication, etc" for a company with one site and 5 or so domain controllers. He is currently unemployed.
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LMAO!
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