[consulting] I Lost My Time Sheet :(

[Ryan Cross]

HI Fred,

That sucks. I've been in that situation before. A few points:

0) Take a deep breath. Go punch a pillow. Blast some music - whatever you
need to blow off the steam ad relax

1) It will take awhile, but its definitely recoverable. The first thing to
keep in mind is that it doesn't have to be perfect - something close enough
is just fine.  Also, time sheets are not anything special - even if you use
a timer to track your hours, there is nothing stopping you from just
letting the time run while you do something else. So, ultimately someone
makes a call that the hours you submit are reasonable for the job/task(s)
completed - so you just have to create something that is reasonable. We're
really only talking about 3 weeks, which is only 15 days or ~120 hrs.

2) I find it best to start by using various pieces of informations to put
boundaries around things, and then slowing building up the timeline and
filling in the gaps as you go along. So, for example start just listing
which days you worked (probably m-f and not weekends). Use calendars for
notes about meetings, commit logs, email trails, issue queues, etc to help
jog your memory.

3) Once you get about 1/3 - 1/2 of it, you should be close enough to just
fudge the it. Then add up all your "from memory" hours and just cross check
it for sanity. Do the hours feel right? Do you have way more hrs or way
less than you should? Would you feel comfortable supporting those numbers
if someone questioned you? etc.

If the recreation process is taking more than 1-2hr max, then you're
putting in too much detail and trying to make it too accurate. The time
you'll loose getting it that accurate will cost you more than any dollars
that might go missing from an invoice.

4) Let your clients double check you, but be honest about it - When you
send out your invoices for jan, I'd say somethign to the effect, "Hi
Client, here are the invoices for Jan. There was a small glitch in the time
tracking software earlier this month, but the time was recovered. If you
spot any errors, please let me know."

5) Go find a better time tracking system - there are tons and a good one is
worth the money. Look at harvest, freshbooks, mite, freckle, paymo.biz or
any of the others. I'm currently switching away from toggl.

6) Back to point 0 - relax, grab a beer and share your new war story with
someone less wise as you now are.

-Ryan





On Mon, Feb 4, 2013 at 12:19 AM, Fred Jones <fredthejonester at gmail.com>wrote:

> I track my time with an app on my desktop and something happened (not
> entirely sure what but it's not really relevant now anyway) and I lost
> all my time worked from Jan 1st through the 19th.
>
> What should I do for my January bills? I charge my clients hourly. I
> don't even know 100% what I worked on and I don't think I can just
> take the details from the 19th through the 31st and multiply them by
> 1.5 because who knows if that's correct? I do a lot of "one off" work
> these days so it's not as though I worked on Clients A, B and C every
> other day.
>
> Not sure what to do.
>
> I guess to multiply by 1.5 is the best I can think of. :(
>
> Any other ideas?
>
> Thanks.
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