I’ve always had a problem with time reporting. When it comes to the end of the month, I’ve found myself dreading that terrible moment when I’ve had to sit down and figure out what I have done during the past month. Sometimes I’ve even resorted to checking the emails I’ve sent during the month to figure out what project I worked on.
Mostly, I’ve kept a timesheet in Excel, or even written special software for it, to keep track of what I do. But it never works, largely because I’ve almost never had the discipline to open up that Excel sheet and fill it out at the end of the day. And with special software, you’ve got to keep track of it during actual work, so it measures the time on the right task. It always worked for a few days, then I forgot about it and then the time reporting was a mess again.
But now I’ve finally found the method.
I print a stack of paper sheets, one for each week, with a matrix layout. Like the tiny example on the left. I just simply fill it out during the day as I go along, writing down the task numbers and I switch between them. At the end of the week, I input everything into our time-reporting system with a 15-minute accuracy, day by day. Problem solved!