TL:DR People like email because there are very few gatekeepers and it kinda just works. Better sharing and a better User Experience in a wiki will make people more productive.

Email is interrupt driven, meaning it relies on the “You have mail” notifications to get peoples attention, and because you know this people expect a response straight away. Of course, that doesn’t happen with snail mail because it’s delivered once a day and people don’t expect a response for a week!

Email’s openness and ease of use in a small groups or teams is quickly lost when you move to larger cross-functional teams too, because you get interruptions from people you don’t know and weren’t expecting.

And when people send out an email to the whole organisation, and someone replies to the whole organisation, which prompts another response, you get interrupted each time for an email you weren’t interested in or could have waited.

Each interruption creates a small cognitive load, a change of track in your brain that takes time to change back to… what was it you were doing?

Email then trains you into busy work or fire fighting, where you learn that the way you work is by hopping from one immediate work request to the next driven by the notification stream of email and now chat.

Email may be open (maybe too open?) but it actually hides information. Both the way emails have become formatted, and the way email clients and servers work, cause the information in email to be lost. The noise in a typical email chain and the evolution of the discussion along forked paths, split, changed and edited to’s and cc’s, all make it hard to find the essence of the discussion and the actual information. Often various versions of a Word document are attached, some in sharepoint, some saved locally and attached to emails, and all with different comments/edits. These word documents point to the fact that documentation is required.

Email servers and clients, as well as the sheer number of emails (mostly noise), do not help in finding that needle in the email chain haystack. Often you can’t find the haystack, email search can be tricky at best.

You can (many do) organise your email into folders, but the almost complete removal of automatic email filtering in Outlook points to the notion that filtering is too hard for most, and manual moving of emails into the various folders is a chore that is left for too long, due to all the fires being put out and trying to understand the last email chain. Indeed the “New” Outlook initially had no way to drag emails from you inbox into another folder or into a directory.

No, not one answer for everything you use email for, but you can fix some of it…

Yeah, Nah as we say here in Aus. Email has its uses, and with Phishing, Spam, Newsletters, filling up the useful space, communicating with people outside your organisation is the sweet spot. Oh, and sending password resets.

OK, we’ve established we do need to track our time, but is tracking our time a good thing?

The quickest way to kill collaboration is to get onto a call with your colleague to pick their brains, and they ask “what cost code do I put this against?” You were looking forward to discussing how to be agile, your heart sinks, and, sigh, Never mind. What if you’ve had a great idea that might make the company a bazillion dollars but there’s no code for that!?

Maybe you’ve had to use [insert enterprise app] for time sheets. It’s a spreadsheet, but worse. Decimal time you have to work out. Weeks and days are spread horizontally and unevenly wrap. It hides away on some obscure part of the HR system in the bowels of your intranet. It really does sap your will to live, and it really doesn’t lend itself to quickly recording time spent on X.

There is always the suspicion that nobody even checks this, it just rolls up into some meaningless report no one reads.

Obviously some managers realise we need better, and since they control money people writing apps make time keeping apps with better integration, and critically, better reporting. So now the “Resource Utilisation Reports” look nice, and are slightly more meaningful. The user interface and the methodology behind the tracking is still so bad that people HATE doing it.

People rarely understand why they need to record time. They come in for 7 hours and 45 minutes and “do the same thing” every day. It’s not like I get more money for doing the time tracking, and I need to get some real work done! So just fill it in at the end of the month by writing the same number in every box. Done. What a pointless waste of human life.

Nobody benefits.

In short we’re missing out on data, efficiency, income and a better life. Every person in an organisation can benefit from good time tracking. If you can show that doing a particular thing the usual way takes 20 minutes every day, and everyone can see that, someone might say if you do this it only takes 10 minutes. That is a saving of 10 x 5 x 48 = 40 hours every year. That is a whole week of work, and if more than one person does that… That is the power of good data.

If you can show that you check emails every 15 minutes because a notification pops up. And that when you don’t get any notifications you can concentrate on the task you’re doing and get it done in half the time. You can justify a policy of no email notifications and checking your email twice a day, because you get more done.

If you can show that you spend an hour each day reading blogs that trigger ideas to improve your work or keep up with industry trends and training, your managers can build that time into planning and costing.

Of course you also need to track time spent on “billable” work for customers so that your company can make money to pay you.

The term billable hours sits uncomfortably with me. The concept is simple enough when you are a contractor and are just rented out to a client. Time = Money. The time you spend at the client is a set rate no matter if you’re drinking coffee or going to the loo or reading a blog. That is billable hours.

If you are remotely providing a client with an outcome, you are not necessarily 100% of this hour on that exact client’s work, but the work you are doing could apply to that client.

Say you read an article that gives you an idea that means your client can benefit, either they can do something new or better or it takes less time. Reading that article is non-billable because you didn’t know it would help that client. The company absorbs the cost by adding an overhead to all customers. If that idea only applies to that customer it costs us money and other clients pay for it in increased overhead! Is that a disincentive to improve?

On the up side non-billable work belongs to the organisation, not the client. So if you can bottle that work it can give you an edge over the competition. The trick here is to not miss the opportunity of that work. To do that you need to record it, and tracking your time can be the key to that.

The Agile Idea is that we are crap at working it all out up front. In Agile, like SCRUM, we set aside time for the base known costs of how to work. We turn those into a few chores that always need to be done to steer the ship, these are planning, review and thinking about what to do next and how. Scrum then time boxes an experiment that might be a thing we use. It will be a thing we build on by reviewing and thinking about how that worked. Think → Try → Review → Think … Review takes into account goals and metrics against those goals. Thinking may reassess the goals based on the outcomes and opinion.

Agile time tracking?? First up, when I use the term agile here I’m not referring to Agile Development Methodologies, but agile practices.

What does all the above tell us?

We need to bring time tracking back down to the team as a tool to improve and understand how they work. These metrics need regular review, or they are just useless numbers.