Time Management

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General Rules 'n Things

• Official work hours are 0900-1700. However, if your full team is in agreement these could be shifted slightly.
• You are entitled to a 1 hour lunch break that's obviously yours to do with as you please. Most people take lunch around 1230-1330.
• When you are on lunch, please update your status on Slack accordingly. There is a default status already set up, or you can use your own if you prefer.
• If you need to be AFK for a period during the day (e.g. a visit to the doctor or a quick walk in the garden) please notify your team beforehand and update your Slack status accordingly.

Time Tracking

• We track all our work time in Clockify.
• The baseline is that within an 8 hour day, you should be doing at least 6 hours of actual work every day.
  • There's one hour for making coffee, receiving deliveries, phone calls, etc, which you don't need to track. If you use some or all of that hour for work, that's great.
  • Then there's an hour for lunch, which you can choose to record or not.
• Our reason for tracking time is not meant to be punitive, but more as a measure of how well we're working based off the estimates made during sprint planning. It will take a couple of sprints to find your velocity for tasks, and tracking your time allows you to more accurately reflect on estimated vs actual times and adjust your estimates accordingly.
• You can use Clockify in a number of ways:
  • Directly in the browser
  • Install the desktop or mobile apps
  • Install the Clockify extension for your browser
    • In the options you can enable it for whichever sites/domains you need.
    • On GitHub and Jira, for example, a Timer Start/Stop button will appear next to the name of a task. Using this will automatically insert that task name as your Clockify time entry, saving you some time typing or copy/pasting the name into Clockify yourself.
  • Install Clockify apps and extensions
• Please ensure that you have assigned the correct project to each time entry.
• Check that you don't accidentally leave a task running overnight or over the weekend.
• Please update Clockify as you go, instead of trying to remember what you did at the end of the week.
• Simplest method is to begin recording when you start working on something, then stop recording when you're done.

Ideal Work Day Structure

There are two distinct needs for all of us every day: time for calls and time for work. With that in mind, while taking into account the feedback everyone provided some time ago and monitoring in more detail what the devs are generally up to and what their days end up looking like, we've put together the following plan for what an ideal structure for your day might look like:

• 0900-0915 Prep for the day ahead
• 0915-1030 Standups/catchup calls
• 1030-1230 Work block 1
• 1230-1330 Lunch
• 1330-1600 Work block 2
• 1600-1700 End of day progress calls

General Guidelines

• Work blocks are dedicated work time where interruptions should be kept to a minimum. Only if you are really stuck should you ping someone else. Ideally no team-wide calls should be scheduled during this time, unless it's specifically to discuss a project issue or to do pair programming.
• Sprint planning, sprint retrospectives and client demos can overlap Work Blocks and the End of Day call period as needed.
• For those in more administrative positions, longer calls (eg with clients, suppliers, internal planning) can be scheduled during the work block times as that's part of the job.
• Don't have a call just for the sake of having a call. IF it's not needed, skip it. Use any non-call time as an extension of the closest work block.
• Limit daily project standups to 15 minutes each where feasible.
• Book shorter calls where possible. For example, aim for 25mins instead of 30, and 45/50mins instead of 60. Enable the Speedy meetings option in Google Calendar to facilitate this.
• Adjust your working hours on Google Calendar to account for the days when you will always be starting later or finishing earlier. For example if you have a standing doctors appointment on Thursday mornings every week, set your start/end times to 1000/1800 so that your availability is clear to those requesting a meeting.
• If you have a default set of appointments that are not work, add them to your calendar so that they can be seen by others wanting to add you to a call. No need to add details, just block the time out.
• Wednesdays are meeting-free days where possible. No standups, no regularly scheduled calls, preferably no client contact unless really needed. This might not be possible on all projects though.

Closing

Ideally, this would be adopted by all of us as much as possible. From a Project Management perspective it's very useful to know that I can book a call with someone after 1600 and they will be expecting that. From a dev perspective, it's very useful to know that you will be less likely to have to take a call during your productive periods.

There is room for some flexibility here too. For example, it's fine if your lunch moves a bit earlier or later to accommodate the planned work. Or if on your current project it makes more sense to do catchup calls straight after lunch and push Work Block 2 to the end of the day. Ideally that is something the project team would agree on as a whole.

It won't be possible to maintain this perfect structure every day, but what we should all do is provide our best effort to do it for our own sakes, and for the rest of the team.

Related reading: The Six Hour Day

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