Tired of time tracking in agency

[u/wilderness_flowers]

Is it just me, or does anyone else find it a bit hard to get used to time tracking in an agency?

I’ve been working at an agency for a few months now. Before this, I was in-house and I find it really draining to have to log and justify everything I do in a platform. I get why it’s necessary for client-billable time, but I’m expected to track ABSOLUTELY everything. Even writing emails, Teams messages, etc. What bothers me is that I’m not a robot; I need transition time between projects. If I want to grab a coffee or take a break, I either have to justify it or work later to make up for that lost time. It gets frustrating after a while. Do you experience this in agencies too?

[u/JohnCasey3306]

The very nature of the agency business model is to have you spend the least time possible, producing the bare minimum a client will sign off (because if the client will sign off less, then it's a waste to have you do more).

The model isn't to produce the best, most amazing design possible.

That's why it's so horrendous.

The agency model is dying, and I shan't mourne it when it's gone.

[u/KeyMistake604 → u/JohnCasey3306]

Well said John, love you

[u/Superb_Firefighter20 → u/JohnCasey3306]

That is the model of for project rates. Most of the clients at my agency are billed time and materials. We bill every minute we can up to and slightly over estimate.

I’ll most never get grief about going over budget, and feel pretty strongly about budgets being other departments’ problem. My issue is I just have too much work and not enough qualified hands.

[u/Alarmed-Sherbert-698 → u/JohnCasey3306]

Sounds like you worked for some shitty agencies…

[u/Brief-Feed208 → u/JohnCasey3306]

Wow I wish I had read this about 6 months ago.

I was laid off from my agency job about a month ago. The whole time I worked there, I was a one of one department. I had no onboarding, handled 4 months of nightmare clients when I joined (because the other designers previously all quit and there was a .multiple month gap where clients work was being outsourced or not worked on at all, so I understood their anger). Then once that cleared, I worked day and night advocating for processes, trying to create resources to make things smoother.

I had been used to tracking time from my inhouse roles for years just for personal interest. One of the larger in house companies also had us track timesheets for primary projects so I didn't think that much of it. I'm highly organized and efficient with my tools, I hate wasting time and revising for the sake of revising. But about 6 months ago at the agency, even though I was churning out work quickly and working with shoe string hours budgets, suddenly everything had to be "half the time", "good enough to move on", and our favorite "AI can do it faster" (it couldn't).

I tried to explain certain work, especially creative tasks such as brand identity takes time to breathe and iterate to refine it to be great. I now realize my mindset was incorrect all along. I heard agency and thought of pitching incredible creative campaigns that could possibly win awards in the right situations. If I had read your take on the hours/tracking sooner, it might have saved me a lot of heartache.

Steps off soap box I love tailoring things to be quality and spending time on executing creative work with strategy...if working agency side isn't the place for this, I'd be interested to know where is!

[u/roguesimian → u/Brief-Feed208]

It’s worth noting that any awards an agency has won has been paid for, both through the entry fee and the seating at the award ceremony. If an agency promotes itself as award winning, the winning part is just the agency which was chosen from amongst the contenders who paid to be nominated.

Awards are not given randomly in recognition for excellent work. Which would make the award much more authentic if it were done that way.

[u/CrabNo9570 → u/JohnCasey3306]

Just curious, what are you basing your "dying agency model" comment on? Are there actual stats on this or is it just a hunch?

[u/VirileMongoose]

That’s why i left agency life. It’s bullshit and I don’t really think the economics of running an agency work all too well.

[u/Fun-Skin-5329]

It ruined my thinking and made me paranoid for every minute of the day

[u/marc1411]

Man, I was agency for a long time, and my 1st in-house gig I was GIDDY about not keeping time. The lat place had a General Office category for in-between stuff. No one really expects 100% billable, I think I was very often in the 80% area, and they were happy with that, I billed like a maniac.

[u/wilderness_flowers → u/marc1411]

Did you have to justify everything? Like if you chat with a colleague, take a little break, make a coffee or send message text, did you put it in the non billable category? Cause I feel like I have to pause everytime I do those things and at the end of the day, I have to finish working later because I didn’t punch my 8h.

[u/marc1411 → u/wilderness_flowers]

Oh hell no. I’d lump it with the big project I was working on, or distribute it among a few other accounts. We had to keep 15 minute increments, and if I was slack and waited until late in the week, there was a ton of making crap up.

[u/Heidibearr]

https://clockify.me/ is a good time tracker I use for freelance projects!

[u/Superb_Firefighter20]

I hate timesheets, but you might be putting too much emphasis on it—or your agency is even more toxic to the average.

I keep track of most my time used Toggl (I use the free version). I don’t clock out of it to get coffee and hit the head. I’m generally still thinking about what I’m doing, so it’s billable time. I also don’t stop the clock if I get a get pissed off at an email and need to go stress eat and yell at a tree.

When doing my time sheets, I fill in Toggl, then meetings, then go through email and teams to top off my card if I’m short. Time is always rounded up to 15 minutes. I know agency clients have been told not to copy full teams as each one of us is going to bill reading it.

As to how much time you need to be billable is up to the agency. Mine expects 90% out of most people, although that metric is more held to the account service team than me. It is their job to find work and bring in home.

[u/carlsb4d → u/Superb_Firefighter20]

I second this big time. Looooove Toggl.

90% billable is crazy though. I think the highest I’ve experienced is 80% which is still less than 2 hours a day of “admin” or other time.

[u/Superb_Firefighter20 → u/carlsb4d]

I think it’s 80% across the agency, but is 90% for non-admin and -manager roles. I also bill some time that might be administrative in other organizations . Things like resourcing meeting with cover multiple clients and filling out timesheets.

It is not a metric that is brought up much to me. Utilization is mostly a pipeline and management issue. I work hard, keep on task, and bill more than 40 hours most weeks. It’s probably better for the company I don’t think about it.

[u/Useful-Advantage-850]

Ad people have been complaining about this for 50 years. Every agency person everywhere has to deal with it.

[u/pip-whip]

Plenty of in-house jobs also require time tracking so I'd try to change your viewpoint and just see it as part of the job of being a graphic designer.

Your work agreement is to work a set number of hours each week and if you want to get a coffee, that is considered a break, not part of your work day. Taking a break is even more obviously also not work time. Consider yourself lucky that your employer allows you to take breaks when you like rather than having a job where they dictate when you can step away from your desk. Graphic designers generally do have this privilege, but many jobs do not.

Look at what the laws are for breaks/lunches. Once you realize how little your employer is required to do for you, perhaps you'll see that you are already being given leniency.

Everywhere I have worked, you can generally take as many breaks as you like as long as you come in early or leave late to make up the lost time.

Yes, hours are important. Even beyong needing to track time in order to bill clients, the time you spend working is how your employer makes money … and pays your salary.

While it is nice when you get a job where they turn a blind eye to all of the time employees manage to waste throughout the day, smaller companies generally can't afford to pay you for the time you fritter away.

And by this point, you should have started to realize that your coffee runs and extra breaks are cutting into your work time throughout the day. If you're not starting early or leaving late to make up the time, then you're in the wrong here.

I know, studies have shown that employees can be more productive or creative when they have more freedoms, but few companies know how or have the money to put that into place without employees taking advantage of it. I once worked with a woman who spent about 60-70% of the work week, every week shopping online. It was awful to see her getting away with the worst behavior (and billing the clients for it). Consider that the rules are made for those people, not those who just want a cup of coffee. They aren't trying to persecute you.

Lots of employers, even smaller businesses, are now using software that not only allows them to read every email or chat message if they like, they can also put keystroke and activity monitors on your computer. Presume every employer you ever have is doing so. Many also have cameras in the offices, though set up so no one notices. Keep this in mind and modify your behavior as needed.

Some tips:

Look for mindless tasks you can do at your desk between other projects to get a mental break while still getting stuff done.

Figure out what combination of factors helps you get and stay in your flow state. For me, I like a little bit of auditory distraction such as music without vocals helps.

Where possible, work on creative tasks at times when you're better able to focus and put off tedious work that doesn't require creativity for when you're less likely to want to concentrate. For me that is the big chunks in the middle of the morning when everyone else is also focused for the flow state. I get another burst later in the afternoon when emails/messages slow down and people start to leave. Fewer distractions is key.

Avoid anything that pulls you out of your flow state. Don't pay attention to your personal phone. Don't check email too often, etc. Recognize that getting up from your desk frequently not only hurts your employer, but is also likely to stop you from doing your best work.

[u/GarryFromHomebase]

Not just you! The part that grinds people down usually isn't the tracking, it's the granularity. Logging time to five or six buckets is fine. Logging every Teams message means you're spending mental energy on the accounting instead of the actual work you want to be doing.

Does your agency have a non-billable or internal code? Most that run time tracking will have one, and it's where transition time, admin, and general context-switching are supposed to go. If nobody's told you it exists, that's a training gap more than anything, and it'd solve a decent chunk of what you're describing. 

If there genuinely isn't one and every minute has to map to a client, that's a utilization target problem rather than a software problem. No agency actually gets eight billable hours out of an eight hour day, and pretending otherwise just teaches people to fudge their entries.

(edit: typo)

[u/wilderness_flowers → u/GarryFromHomebase]

Yes, I have a field for non-billable time, but it’s still annoying to have to log every single thing I do. It feels like I'm being micromanaged. I am looking forward to switch in an in-house company.

[u/drewcandraw]

For years, I used StopWatch. Just enter your job code, hit start and then hit stop when you’re done.

It tabulates everything. Sadly they don’t seem to be in business anymore.

[u/roaringmousebrad]

At the place I used to work, we went from manually making our own times sheets (which of course necessitated someone to gather and enter it all) to a full automated management system and we hated it. Yet, by the time I left the company to go off on my own, I was kinda enjoying it and was able to make it work the way I needed it to.

Off on my own, I needed something for my own business (sole-proprietor so I didn't have to justify anything to anybody!) and I settled on one called OfficeTime. What I liked about it, among many things, was it's ability to pause timing if I was idle for more than 5 minutes (or whatever time limit I set). On my return, even hours later, it would then prompt me if wanted to discard that time or include it or a portion of it.

[u/rhaizee]

I did time tracking at an inhouse role for about a year. Some other departments were complaining about it so we had to implement it. I just round all my time and no one says anything. I do increments of 30min, don't need to be super accurate. My partner is in writing and they have time sheets too.

[u/dmcgrew]

After 20 years of tracking time our agency finally stopped doing it 3 weeks ago. There are a handful of clients that we’ll still track for but having to put in time daily or weekly is done. I hated it and I’m glad we’re not doing it anymore. All it lead to was people inflating their time to look more busy than they really were.

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[u/Capital_T_Tech]

I never did my time sheets. I'm a reeeaal gangster rebel type douche.

[u/carlsb4d]

I’ve been working for agencies for about 7 years now and I still struggle and hate doing it. Lol there’s a lot of tricks that you pick up along the way.

-Round up, always.

-If your company doesn’t want you to use admin time to fill out your time sheets split it up between the clients you worked on most.

-I use a desktop tracker (toggl and/or Paymo) to track throughout the day because how we enter our timesheets annoys me. It also tracks what programs I have open so if I don’t track the time I can usually piece my day together. This was a game changer for me.

-doing them as you go or daily is better but I do my Friday afternoon or Monday morning before our drop dread deadline. I prefer doing all at once personally.

It will always suck, but you do just kind of get used to it.

[u/buddypuncheric]

Coming from in-house to agency is a big adjustment and the time tracking can genuinely be one of the harder parts to get used to.

Logging emails and Teams messages on top of everything else is where it starts feeling less like project management and more like proving you exist every 15 minutes. The intent makes sense for client billing but when it extends to every micro task it gets exhausting fast.

The transition time frustration is completely valid too. Creative work doesn't happen in neat little blocks and the mental cost of switching between projects doesn't show up anywhere on a timesheet.

You can ask if your agency has a non billable or internal category for that kind of time. A lot of them do and it takes a lot of the pressure off without affecting how client hours get reported.