Time Tracking for your whole work
You would like to use wrike's time tracking feature to fully track your workday? Here is how we do that:
It's not a big deal to track the time your're working on scheduled tasks of your wrike projects. But there might be some more things you spend your time at work with. To track them, follow these steps:
- If you haven't done already, create a dummy user (a collaborator license will do) and name him "Dummy Wrike" or somehow else
- Create a custom workflow with a specific status named "for timetracking only" or similar
- Create a folder in a public space with a similar name and set the default workflow to the one you've just created before.
- Create a task for every daliy business work that is typically not part of a scheduled project. E g. Checking Emails, Cleaning up, helpdesk, chat with colleagues, etc.
- Make sure these tasks have the status "for timetracking only"
- Share this folder to everyone who should use the time tracking and teach your colleagues how to use it:
- Add your favourites to a personal folder for easy access or use the star function. You could also create a widget with these items or simply find them with the search function.
- Track your time spending on unplanned work in realtime or add entries asap after your device is available. Pause the tracking and use the dropdown list of paused tasks to continue it. Make sure to clear this list every day by adding entries before you finish your workday. Use comments and categories to specify entries.
The Dummy user ensures timetracking tasks may not appear on your to do list, as there's no need to work on them at a specific date. So they should not have a due date, and will never get finished. If data privacy is not an issue, every employee may use the same dummy tasks to track their time. Otherwise everyone would need to create (or duplicate) their own.
What a great idea to share these tasks. I have these tasks set up for myself and track them for myself, but this is a great way to add collaboration to your team.
This is a great suggestion for tracking non-billable / or admin time! We're not using time tracking just yet in Wrike, but we look forward to doing it some day! This will be a handy tip for non-client related time!
Thanks for the tip. We are not using time tracking but are investigating the capabilities for future.
I have seen the idea of a "dummy user" in several places, it would be super cool if Wrike could have an additional licence type that is free for this kind of purpose so smaller organizations don't have to use one of their paid user slots.
I don't understand why you need a dummy user?
We just have a task called "Admin tasks" where everyone adds their non-job work timelogs to. It is not allocated to anyone. The task just sits there for everyone to use.
"So they should not have a due date, and will never get finished. If data privacy is not an issue, every employee may use the same dummy tasks to track their time. Otherwise everyone would need to create (or duplicate) their own."
Do(es) the dummy task(s) need to be shared with others. We don't use time tracking at all in my team but I imagine the rule that you can only see what you're shared into applies. Therefore your manager (or project lead) would need to be able to see this task?
We do something similar track departmental, self improvement, meetings, and time off.
Hi George Fiveash,
in our company we've shared the most spaces with the whole staff to improve collaboration. So an employee is able to see what happens in other departments too. Therefore we can also see time-tracking entries of colleagues in their specific tasks. There's no need for us to hide these basic dummy tasks with their time-tracking entries from colleagues. So these tasks have only to be created once and are shared with everyone.
But as I mentioned, it might be necessary to duplicate these tasks in a different setup.
Did I answer your question?
Florian
Hi Debbie Brownlie,
thank you for your question, I was waiting for it! The dummy user is a trick to prevent unassigned tasks which should be avoided in general. I see only one reason for unassigned tasks, if a taks is planned, but the responsible person isn't defined yet.
We've set up a widget which shows all unassigned tasks to ensure nothing gets lost, because wrike can't address anyone to remind. I think it's one of the greatest risks in wrike to accidentially create unassigned tasks, as new tasks are not automatically assigned to the creator.
By the way: There is a request for avoiding unassigned tasks here: https://help.wrike.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/115000536485-Assign-a-task-based-on-its-folder-project-default-task-owner- Please support by voting for it with a heart! My comments to this issue can be found here: https://help.wrike.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/115002408545/comments/360011129094
Yes thank you Florian Kislich 😁
We use a very similar process to track non-client time and it is very helpful!
This is a very interesting idea. My team is not using time tracking yet, but after reading this post I will keep it in mind if/when we need to begin tracking time in Wrike.
My team did something similar but with tasks in our personal folder versus our regular tasks in team folders but I wish we'd thought of this option. I have separate tasks for emails, meetings, and training that I pin to my time sheet view for daily entry. It can be somewhat discouraging to see how much time I'm in meetings some days, but valuable information for measuring available productive time and supporting new resource modeling. Thanks.
Thanks four your feedback Jason West and Shawn Flanagan!
Thanks for the info! We don't use time tracking right now, I will have to look into this.✌️
Great info. For all our government clients and hourly billable clients we have to track time. Sometimes multiple people work on a project - the time tracking and reporting is easy!
We do not track time at the moment. No billable tasks. But I like the idea of tracking unplanned work, rework or even meeting times to see how much time we're spending on non-value-added work.
Thank you @everyone for taking the time to contribute to this thread 🙌🏼
Thanks for sharing this! If we ever start tracking time, I will give this a try!
Looking forward to hearing how it goes for your team if you do, Robin Hayes!
This a good idea Florian Kislich! Thanks for the suggestion. We do time tracking in the company already, and it's true that there are a LOT of time spent that's not directly related to a Project. Will be sharing this.
Thanks for your feedback Therese,
I'm always happy to help!
Florian
Just found this and thought I would add, we don't use a dummy user because we do assign these tasks to everyone. We appreciate people can't do core work 100% of their day, so in the workload they might have 8 hours open per day, but we elect to use this tasks to block out 2 hours per day, per person, as we expect the team to take part in meetings, events, L&D, admin, etc. In this way our Project Managers can't overbook them and they have an obvious task to log their 'non-project' time. Thoughts..? Any other ideas? Similar set ups?
Stephanie Kirk you can also use a JobRole to assign such dummy task or if you have an own workflow you create a status (I use a status called "Information only" in our workflow), which is not show in dashboards. This you can do for time tracking.
For workload planning this does not work because the effort is not allocated to the user but to the dummy user (or jobrole). If you want to prevent overbooking you can set the daily working capacity of useres to 6h/day (this is what we do). So in workload chart they appear as completly booked as soon as they have 6 hours effort planned per day. See the help from wrike: Managing Daily Capacity in Work Schedules – Wrike Help Center