How account for your 'In'-processing time on a timesheet?

[Mike Simms]

In the recent podcast on the guided weekly review, the speaker reminds us that "it takes most people an hour to an hour and a half every day to get thier 'Ins' to zero" (that refers to ALL inboxes phyisical, digital, etc suppose!). And that's even before the weekly review can take place!

When even getting your In to zero takes time - e.g. suppose you find it useful to write up important phone calls in a journal so that you can pick up where you left off and not to hold in your head, of course! But it seems to much to make that into an action.

For those of you have to account for your time in a timesheet or on indeed on an invoice, my question is how to represent all this 'meta-work' without being unfair to either yourself or your boss/client? The problem seems to be that I am in a sense switching rapidly from one project to another and tracking that time would create drag in itself. I do use a time-tracker for 'proper actions' and find it excellent.

Thinking out loud I could have make list of 10-minute actions that get done immediately after the easy/quick ins are processed...
Does anyone have a way to organise their in-processing time so that slivers of short but worthwhile actions can be accounted for?

 

[Folke]

In my invoices I do not specify this at all (and no one has ever asked me to account for it). I just present a "total hours" for the whole month for that client, often with a general one- or two-line comment about what the work has been that month.

In my own billing journal I keep a single line for each day with a total hours (estimated and rounded at the end of the day with a 15-minute granularity) and a short description of what the main tasks have been that day. If all I have done on a particular day is check email and make some quick responses I usually just put that down as "email and calls 30 min" etc.

 

[Oogiem]

For those of you have to account for your time in a timesheet or on indeed on an invoice, my question is how to represent all this 'meta-work' without being unfair to either yourself or your boss/client?

2 answers from 2 different POVs:

1. When I was working for a company that lived and died on billable hours that sort of stuff was called overhead hours and was then parceled out to the clients bills based on the percentage of my total time for that client during that billing period. So if I had say 40 hours direct billable work in a week for 5 clients and spent 10 hours on overhead each client's actual invoice had 2 more hours added to it, their portion of the overhead. It did get a bit more complicated when one client had more or less billable hours than another. The overhead hours are shown as just that on the invoice, overhead charges and not assigned to a particular task or deliverable. When I did that job my time had to be accounted for in 6 minute segments and we had to track it very carefully.

2. Now as my own boss I still like to know how much time I spend on "overhead" things like clearing my inboxes, and routine housekeeping tasks, paying bills and other "overhead" for running the farm and my life. So I track that on my calendar that serves as both a forward look at what is coming up and a diary of what I actually did. I now track on 15 minute segments as that is the smallest time slot I care about.