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Tracking Time - in depth#

A more detailed explanation on tracking time

👍 A Tooling Rule of Thumb

  • BambooHR is for approvals
  • Jira is for tracking
  • Google Calendar is for planning and visibility

Time tracking basics#

(The TL;DR version)

  • You log the hours you are at work
  • If you are not working - because you are taking paid leave, e.g. annual leave or sick leave - you log the hours

  • If you are not working - because it is personal time, unpaid leave or a public holiday - you don’t log anything

  • Time tracking is a legal requirement in almost all countries where we are present

Logging time#

Logging your time in Jira should be easy and simple.

It should take you only 2 minutes to log your time each day, and should be part of your daily routine as the last thing you do.

Time tracking in Jira uses the Tempo App
From the main menu in Jira, go to Apps > Tempo > My Work. There are a few ways to make Tempo work for you, depending on the type of work that you do and the selection of tickets that you are asked to log against, based on your Workstream.

time-tracking-jira

Getting set up#

Some basics to get you started

  • Find the tickets that you will need to be using most often, and add them to your favourites list
  • Have a look at the settings and layout option of the Issues sidebar, to choose the display that shows you your tickets at a glance
  • Click the cog icon under the word “Timesheet” and set the options that suit you, for weekend and daily start time
  • Click the filter icon under the word “Timesheet” and look at the options that are offered to you
  • Link your Google Calendar - in the left sidebar go to Apps > Google Calendar and link the two
  • Switch between the Calendar / List / Timesheet displays to see how they differ
    • We highly recommend using the Calender view
  • Public Holidays are highlighted in red in Tempo, and the hours are deducted from your weekly total required (also see Gotchas)

Using Google Calendar and Tempo#

If the bulk of your week is driven by your calendar, this is probably the easiest way to track your time.

  • Once you have linked your Google Calendar to Tempo, all your meetings, focus blockers, OoO blockers will pull through into the Calendar and List views, showing you your week ahead
  • When creating an event in Google, add the Jira ticket number in the title of description - this is recognised by Tempo, and you can convert a planned event to logged time with one click
    • It is highly recommended that especially all recurring events and focus blockers have the ticket added
  • Events which are marked private do not pull through - useful to add to personal blockers, so that they don’t convert to logged time
  • Events where you’ve responded “Maybe” still show
  • Once you have logged time to a calendar event, you can click the delete button, and it will remove the time log, not the event

Jira planner and Tempo

Jira Planner was removed in H2 2023 due to lack of use. If you feel the need for this to be reimplemented, please contact IT with a use case.

Jira Tickets and Tempo#

Any time you open a Jira ticket for a few minutes, or interact with a ticket in any way, that ticket will automatically appear in the Calendar/List view on the Tempo planner.

  • In Tempo, you can quickly click on the tickbox to convert it to logged time, else delete it to ignore
  • If you use the Calendar view, it will appear around the time of day that you had that ticket open.

You can disable this by going to the “filter” icon on the top right of the page, if it becomes too cluttered.

☀️ At the end of the day#

  • At the top of the day click the “Log Activities” button - all events with the ticket already recognised will convert to logged time, as well as Jira tickets you’ve worked on
  • Any event that did not have a ticket, you just click the edit icon, find the ticket from your favourites and click “Log time”
  • Then fill the gaps - and this is where the Calendar view comes in super handy!
    • You can now see your day from 9 to 5 and see where the gaps are
    • This view also logs time by default in 15min increments - which is the basic that we also ask
    • Extend events that actually took longer - e.g. if a 45min meeting actually took 55mins, extend it to the full hour
    • Add timelogs to the gaps between the events that you had, assigning to the most relevant ticket to account for your day
    • Leave the gap open when you took a lunch break, or popped to the shops (i.e. your flexitime)

Submitting timesheets#

Jira and Tempo provide a workflow to submit time sheets for approval. This locks your timesheets for the past week, and sends it to a selected person to review and approve.
We don’t require that you submit your timesheets, but you can.

  • This can be useful to individuals who like a routine, and want to more ‘formally' close off the week.
    • So on a Friday afternoon, or Monday morning, review the week gone by and click the submit button, knowing you’ve completed that week.
  • It might also be useful if you and your lead are wanting to track timelogs for a period of time for some reason, or you are wanting to highlight to your lead a change in pattern or workload.

If you do submit your timesheets you may need to reach out to BizOps to make the relevant approver available to your profile.

Some Jira “Gotchas”#

Don’t always blindly trust the required hours as shown in Jira!

  • Public Holidays are loaded as a number of hours for each day
    • So Christmas Day in Switzerland has it loaded as being 8h, and in Australia as 7h 36m
    • Zurich has two half day holidays, which are loaded as 4h each
    • The gotcha: If you are on a lower workload, Jira doesn’t quite understand this, and will give you the total hours off as loaded - so it will show you 8h less in your total week requirement, not the 6.4h (assuming you work 80%)
  • Public holidays #2
    • Not all holidays were previously loaded in hours, but rather in days, where Jira sees a standard day to be 8hrs
    • The gotcha: if you were not on an 8h day in the past, but the holiday was loaded as 1d, the required time would not reflect accurately
    • (This is now correct for all locations from 1 Jan 2023)
  • As already mentioned, if your workload or daily working hours changed at some point in time
    • Jira will account for you at that those current hours for all time
    • The gotcha: If you look back at historical time logs to compare logged vs required, this will not be an accurate reflection

The Flexitime Tracking sheet does take these gotchas into account.

Note

If you have some additional tips and tricks on how to make time logging easier and simpler, please let us know! #team-bizops-help