tracking your real time spent for activities ...
The english verb "to emphasize" has the meaning "stressing sth.", "prominence", "distinguish", "highlighting", "accentuating" and also "to get to the heart of sth." (see further spellings and common phrases).
What is it that the time-reporting Time2Emphasize App accentuates, highlights and gets to the heart of? The main aim of this web service is to focus on the simplicity of one functionality: that of tracking time itself. By concentrating just on this task, the tool follows an approach which makes gathering extremely easy. In comparison to this approach there are many other tools for time-tracking, which may provide an amazing set of features, but mostly provide a less usable acquisition.Following this idea, further development of Emphasize will concentrate on improving this core capability.
Some time ago I did my time-reporting somewhat different. The project-leader approached me and demanded what I had been up to last month for our client. In order to do so he set up some time-accounts for us to book on to. Well, then I stopped developping for two hours to invent some reasonable looking figures for these time-accounts. It didn't take long to find out that there was a discrepancy between the existing time-accounts and the ones I should have booked on, at least for the passed month and as far as I could remember. But don't bother I thought, our client only seems to want the time-reporting in the categories available and that's what really counts. I obviously have no idea if what I had recorded as activities were any close to accurate. How should I, there were only a few sources to make assumptions of what I had been up to that month:
Anything else, short notices with starting- and stopping-times, intelligent Excel-Sheets which are supposed to do things automatically or any other time-reporting system XYZ which just offers long rows of input-fields, have not really sustained my task over the long run consiquently enough: too fixed in categories, too painful for entering times, too many clicks to achive at least a decent accuracy.
I tend to call these kind of approaches unwittingly faking time-reporting.
Nowadays I am more honest. I know when I fake! I have the Time2Emphasize App open for time-reporting and move my pawn as soon as I start a new activity or resume a paused one. For this I need: one single click! That does not hurt, looks nifty as the figure hovers in mid-air. If I for once forgot to set my figure, I just turn back time and correct it. I'm not a fussy stopwatch-lover. I tend to forget the current time when I'm working, just when I'm leaving my desk I want to know if I did any surplus or not. This is optained through the "daily report". My system of fields where I do my booking on is changing very frequently, just to fit any current need. And then, when I'm supposed to fill in the other time-reporting tool of a client, I switch into that with a click on the activity (just now I am working with JIRA) and copy'n'paste the duration. Or I fake adjust the duration deliberately, but at least I know what I'm up to!
From a project-leading point of view I am now more capable to justify what I have really done without to much bothering about. From the client point of view the numbers which sum up are actually worthy now. I think this is just the point where the duty of having to report and a voluntary control done by oneself approach and supplement each other.