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"Micromanagement" and "Time Poor" - 2 concerns that scream out when I look at this product. RescueTime did a fantastic job at removing the "time poor" component
by semerda 18y ago
"Micromanagement" and "Time Poor" - 2 concerns that scream out when I look at this product.
RescueTime did a fantastic job at removing the "time poor" component for keeping track of where you spend your time, hence living up to its name.
Having worked in the corporate world and in start-ups I can tell you now that most corporate clients already have a time sheet system that is a pain in the a. Employees spend at least 30mins or so a day writing everything they did throughout the day and billing their time where appropriate.
When it comes to getting management feedback for each task you did, again managers are time poor having to deal with more then 1 person in their team + their own tasks from higher management. Hence why performance reviews between you and manager occur every quarter / 6 months / annually and only focus on the high level picture - the stuff that counts - the outcomes / results.
Micromanagement is another issue; no one likes to jot down every action they did. What "matters" is always the end result not the bits in the middle. I.e. taking a client for coffee spending 2 hours out of the office is a step to a potential sale (building rapport). At the end of the day, the sale is what will count on your performance agreement not the coffee break. My manager doesn't want to know that I went to coffee with a client unless I managed to get a sale.
I'm sure some of you would have heard this before but the best workers are those where management give them what they need to do their job and let them do it without micromanaging their time. How and when they do it doesn't matter, all that matters is the end results (outcomes).
- yangyang42 18y agoI would agree, the "time poor" issue is obvious. However, I've been testing this out a little and figure to try it on myself first (me managing me). My first impression--besides idiotwork--is that they really make things simple. They seems to be going for the twitter, microblogging style for management. They really reduce a lot of the fat out of managing tasks and reporting. I like how it just asks, "What did you do?" Instead of, "what's the progress?" "what are your road blocks?" "are you sure you're not critical path?" I'm not sure if this tool will answer those questions, but I'm not sure if they're aiming to do that either. But then again, I'm not as "time poor" as some may be.
- danw 18y agoAs a developer I solve this by importing an RSS feed of my subversion commits and trac tickets. I then only have to manually add other stuff such as any topic I spent time reading up on or researching.
- dangrover 18y agoI have something very similar for a dashboard-like interface I use to figure out what's going on in my ISV. Here's what it looks like: http://files.dangrover.com/wwactivity.png http://files.dangrover.com/wwactivity.png That's sales (integrated with the order system), SVN commits, wiki edits, bug tickets. There's also a pane that shows yearly/monthly/daily goals for sales. I'm going to have it keep track of my releases too, just so that I can quickly update the site, appcasts, etc and have it tell me when a major release is getting long in the tooth. Since I use Mint for web stats, I've thought about joining that in just to try to correlate hits/sales, but haven't gotten around to it. Too meta :)