timr is very flexible and let’s you track your working and project times in many different ways. For ourselves, we track our times now since more than a year using timr. In this time we figured out our own timr best practice that perfectly supports our needs. Maybe this would also be a good solution how to use timr for your needs.

Track Working and Project Time

In the morning, as soon as I’m in the office, the first thing that I do on my computer is to start the timr work time tracking. Then I start reading emails and IT-News. As soon as I’m ready I start becoming “productive” and that means that I start the timr project time tracking for the project I’m going to work on.

timr remains always open in the browser and as long as I don’t need it, it’s in the background.

If I get a phone call from a customer which needs support, I switch to timr as soon as I realize that this phone call would last more than e.g. 3 minutes. I stop the current project time tracking and start to track the phone call for the project that the call is related to. This goes very fast and parallel to the phone call. As soon as the phone call is done, I stop this project time and add a comment what the call was about. You could also add e.g. 5 minutes to the phone call’s project time since this call interrupted your work and flow for the last project, the customer that interrupted you might pay for it, not the customer whose work was interrupted.

If I have to go to a customer during the day, I stop my timr working time tracking for ‘office time’ and start it with the working time type ‘business travel’. Depending on whether I can bill the customer for the travel or not, I start project time tracking for the project when I leave the office or as soon as I’m at the customer’s site. When I finished the work I stop the project time and add a comment what I did. Back at the office I stop the working time for ‘business travel’, create a comment in which town I was (to calculate my daily allowance) and start the working time again for ‘office time’.

Projects and Tasks Structure

We make a difference in tracking working and project times. That means we start working time as soon as I’m in the office but we start project time only when we work for a customer or internal project or task, nobody is 100% productive.

The important thing is, our project structure looks like the following:

• CustomerA
  • Project1
    • Support
    • Offers
    • Orders
      • 501001-Enhancement 1
      • 501003-Create new feature xy
      • 501002-Create new feature aaa
  • Project2
    • Support without order
    • Support
    • Offers
    • Orders
      • 501111-Create new feature bbb
      • 501033-Create new feature ccc
• CustomerB
  • …
• Internal
  • Administration
  • Sales
  • …

The granularity with that you’d like to structure your tasks is on your choice. A very fine granularity means that you often have to switch tasks in the project time tracking but you get very precise reportings. You can experiment with your project structure since timr lets you always change and optimize your structure! Let’s say you recognize that creating two different support tasks for ‘Customer1->Project2′ was to euphoric and you’d like to rearrange them into just one support task. In the administration page, simply drag the ‘Support without order’ onto the ‘Support’ task and select merge. Now, all recordings for ‘Support without order’ will be added to ‘Support’, and ‘Support without order’ will be removed.

If you have to bill your customers different charges depending on whether you had to work for them on the weekend or at night you don’t have to extra tag those tasks. With timr you always track the time when you did something so you implicitly know which charge you have to bill.

Conclusion

If you like, you can make a distinction between working and project/task time tracking. If you are only interested in the time that you can bill your customers, project time tracking will be enough. If you’d like to know how much time you spend at work and how much time of that is billable, you should track working and project times! It’s also no problem to start with project time tracking and as soon as you realize that you’d also like to know your total working time, additionaly start to track working times. Work time tracking also helps you to know how much time you spent in the office or in the field due to the working time types.

Tell us how you work with timr

We are interested to hear from you about your timr best practice! Let us know in wich business you are and how you are using timr to track your time.