How to keep track of time spent helping others?

Question

I'm a fast learner so I often become the go-to guy in the office (and out of it, but that's off topic), I love helping people and I learn much from seeing different perspectives, ideas (even bad ones) and solutions to problems the organization is facing.

Thing is, that my own work sometimes suffers from this.

I want to balance time spent on my own tasks and helping others, but to do that I need to track and see when and if I'm helping too much during the day.

I thought about getting a push counter and pushing it every time a person asks me for help and I oblige, or writing post it notes of who I helped and with what and count them at the end of the day.
The problem with both that they don't help me track time, and the post it option is messy.

Using a stopwatch app will probably alienate my coworkers, thinking I'm timing them.

I'm looking for something that will not take me too long to "activate" so it won't double the time spent on helping others, as most cases helping is a 5 minute process here and there.
Any other ideas how I should do this?

Answer 1

As my side project I implemented an OSQA (Stackoverflow clone) web site at my work. Everytime someone asks me a question I direct them to the site and answer the question on a public forum. This has saved me time as I can easily refer repeat questions to the site and it has enabled others to join the community and help each other. In addition my contributions are recorded in a Karma points and management has visibility into what I know and contribute. You can find more information about OSQA at this link.

Answer 2

There's nothing wrong with using a stopwatch application, either openly or discretely. What happens now when somebody comes to your desk for help? You probably say "just a sec", finishing typing whatever you were in the middle of, save a file, kick off a build, or whatever, right? Clicking on a virtual stopwatch is just one more bit of typing. It needn't be invasive, once you've written (or found) the application. (A coworker once wrote something like this so he could track which projects he was spending how much time on; he had it prompt for the project name at the end, not the beginning, so it didn't interrupt the flow while someone was standing there waiting.)

If you're concerned about the impression you're giving, as one commenter suggested, you can just explain to people that you're trying to better understand how you spend your time (optional: so you can give better estimates in the future), and it's not personal and you want to help them. It's just data-collection -- no big deal. If your employer tracks time spent on different projects (daily timesheet), you probably ought to be doing that anyway.

Answer 3

Since you're working at a office, why don't you use Office ;) You could invest some time to create a nice little excel template.

A guy working next to me does that, not for your reasons, though. He keeps track of his time, because he is involved in a lot of different projects.

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As a sidenote. I wouldn't keep track of things that are just taking minutes. But if you're spending 30mins+, it's probably a good idea.

If you're such a handy guy, why don't you extend your position to a job where people can actually seek your advice?

UPDATE

I came off with another idea, after I read the comments.

It is openly known that you're the handy guy, so bring that up in the next meeting (maybe via mail, but I recommend the meeting). Tell people how these interruptions disturb your workflow, and that a interruption of 5minutes can lead to an effective time loss of 30+mins, since it disturbs your state of mind.

Ask what the others think about it. And how your situation could be improved.

• A solution would be to have opening hours. People can seek your advice from 10 a.m. till 1 p.m. or sth. like that. For the rest of the day you would like to focus on your work.

• Ask people to address their problems via email, so you can decide when you want to take a look at the mail. Answer it via mail, or maybe even go to them in person.

• Maybe combine these two approaches. Opening hours, where people can come by and for the rest of the time ask people to address their needs via mail.

Answer 4

Register on a site like Harvest and simply enter your time spent on activities there. You can take the opposite approach of tracking the time you're actually working and when someone asks you to help them, stop your timer and restart when you're ready to get back to work. The difference between the time you worked and the time you spent at the office (minus lunch) is the time you spent helping others.

Answer 5

I keep a journal of what I am working on each day, with the times and project information. It's a simple text file, but the format isn't very important.

I put in the time I come in and the project, and any notes that I might find useful about what I am doing. If I am interrupted, I put the time down, help them, and then make a note about what I did, then put the time down and go back to what I was working on.

This has several advantages. If I want to know how much time I spent on something, I can go back and find out, but I'm spending very little time tracking something that I may not want to check. I do have to put in some time at the end of the day, and I can look at my journal and tell how much time I spent on each project. I send a weekly status report to my boss, and I look at this to see what I worked on during the week and issues I had that are still unresolved. And if I remember solving the same problem in the past, I can easily search my journals, find how I fixed it last time, and resolve it quicker this time. (This is especially handy for me, since I don't remember the details for more than a week or so.)

So, I am tracking the time, but not adding it up unless I need to know. It takes seconds to write it down, as I have the journal open for notes at all times anyway.