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.

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Comments

$bvb379

Priston wrote: »

Document something that took 10 minutes in explicit detail. Enough detail it takes over an hour to document it. Then document it took over an hour to document that 10 minutes of your day.

I actually do this. I document my time for documenting time. If you think about it, I am driving x amount of hours and doing x amount of work. That work has to be line itemized for the client to know what we are doing. Sometimes is takes me 45 minutes to do my work documentation for a few clients.

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 don't know how to double quote.)

I am on salary so I am getting paid. I drive anywhere from 2-4 hours a day sometimes around the city. A lot of people might like the idea of "getting paid to drive" but it is terrible.

powerfool

mbarrett wrote: »

Sounds like they're encouraging you to bullsh!t your way through the day.
Not a good way to go through life.

Exactly. It is unreasonable. If management is actually serious about this, they would document their time and expose it to those that they expect to do the same. It is ridiculous. These folks read all of the hyped up books and they know that nobody is 100% productive, including themselves.

This is the opposite direction from that which I want to shift... I want less stress and this seems anxiety-ridden.

$bvb379

powerfool wrote: »

Exactly. It is unreasonable. If management is actually serious about this, they would document their time and expose it to those that they expect to do the same. It is ridiculous. These folks read all of the hyped up books and they know that nobody is 100% productive, including themselves.

This is the opposite direction from that which I want to shift... I want less stress and this seems anxiety-ridden.

The problem is that we are a tiny shop ~20 employees but this system is for a large scale operation. If all of us were balls to the wall busy all day I would not care but that is not the case. Also, when you guys say management, it is actually 3 owners. We (the engineers) don't go into "time review meetings" but from what I understand they just put an 8 hour block for "management."

mbarrett

powerfool wrote: »

Exactly. It is unreasonable. If management is actually serious about this, they would document their time and expose it to those that they expect to do the same.

Reminds me of this.

Manager.jpg

ImYourOnlyDJ

I used to work for an MSP and had to do it in 15 minute blocks. At my current position I used get annoyed needing to "approve" (exempt so it never changed) my timesheet every two weeks

. Thankfully that's behind me and I only need to fill out PTO sheets now