Today I learned

It took me by surprise how constraining it was to tack my working hours. I only noticed after I no longer hand to track them how much of a problem it really was.

For the past ten plus year I was working as a consultant for all kinds of software related topics but primary in terms of language engineering. I helped organisations to build their own domain specific languages. While sometimes we had research projects or worked on open sources projects the majority of the work was for clients. Even when contributing to open source software it was often on the behalf of a client. Part of working clients is that you need invoice your time. So tracking how long and when you worked on something is absolutely required. While you most likely don’t need to track things down to an hour at least through the week you need track how much time you spent on which customer.

How detailed the reporting is and how throughly the client checks these numbers varies from client to client. Some even require you to track the time spent on their project in their systems as well as in your company ones. Even if the contracting scheme doesn’t require you to invoice hours, they are usually still tracked for project controlling reasons. Depending on how tightly controlled the project is you might need to book these hours every week but at least once a month.

While since working in consultancy I found tracking my working hours totally normal I recently noticed how much of a distracting and a constraint they were for me. I recently changed from consulting company to a product company. Where the whole team works on the product of the company. No working hours tracking required, no write ups what I spent my time on demanded by a customer or project management.

I can just spent my time on the topics that I think are important. Of course there is goals to reach and features to deliver. But if I decide to spent a day helping a colleague or fixing a bug that I saw while doing code review, nobody cares. I don’t need to think about how to put this in the time sheets. I also don’t need to think about, if what I’m working is invoice able to the customer or not. Having an all hands meeting or talking to couple of colleagues to align architecture across projects? You can just doing without ever thinking about how to put this into a customer project.

This experience was very unexpected for me. While working in consulting I never felt it as much or burden to track my hours. Now that I don’t have to it feels like much more freedom and trust. The company trusts me that I will spent my time in ways that benefit the company and work towards the goals we agreed on. But how much time I spent on it, when I spent it? I can decide. Something takes twice as long as planned? Of course it might still cause trouble with deadlines but at least I don’t need to worry that somebody is upset because a number in an excel sheet higher than expected.