“Time is the most valuable commodity you can spend, for once you’ve spent it, you can never get it back.”

What we do with our time is as important as how we spend our money. There’s an inflow of 24 new, fresh, wonderful hours every day. Usually 8 of these go directly into work, sometimes more, sometimes less.

The lifeblood of any business is money, funds, cash. What goes out must also come in to cover what goes out, and we’d like to make a nice little profit as well. If something doesn’t make money, then get rid of it. Find the holy cash cow and milk it.

We track our money flows very well. But what we usually don’t track as well is time. With 20 guys sitting around, 8 hours a day, 40 hours a week… We’re talking 800 man-hours per week. And usually we’re not too clear on how it’s spent.

Before we can improve, we need to measure ourselves. And before we can measure anything, we need to track it; break down the time spent on activities and measure how long it took. Did a certain task take 16 hours or 24? How much time have I spent on activity x so far, and how much more do I estimate I will spend? Was my estimate correct? Why not?

Money is tracked down to the last cent. But time?

For an agile business, the trick is to find a way to track time expense without slowing down the business processes. Maybe that’s why I like SCRUM.

(No, I don’t think we should measure everything down to the last minute. But I’d like to know how many hours a certain task took. Because if we know that, we can calculate if that activity was profitable or not. And if it wasn’t – should we have done it?)