One Common Format For All The Time Tracking Tools

Time tracking is a quite common thing nowadays and not only in IT but everywhere where it’s needed to track working hours of employees. Some companies use it for analytics and reporting, others for calculating bonuses and overtime payments, some for controlling and overview. Especially it’s important in consulting, where logged time reflects how the consulting company bills its clients.

It’s all good and quite obvious until we deal with it as users who need to track their time. I just list here some of the problems that I had using a huge amount different tracking tools in my life:

• You have to track multiple times. E.g on your client-side and for your agency. It also depends on system efficiency where you work. I used to track hours till 5 times because it had to be done in multiple tools on multiple sides.
• If you track multiple times, the probability to make a mistake grows. It leads then to ping-pong with your controlling colleagues, who also need to make sure, that everything is correct because time=money.
• Many tools are self-hosted. In the worst case it means that the tool just can be not available when you need it. In the better case, it’s slow and you’re waiting till your browser completes the loading of the page to fill one input field.

All these and similar points are completely frustrating, especially when you understand that you could use this time for something useful. Losing time should not disappoint only employees. Employers should also understand how exhausting it can be for workers and in the end expensive for business in case of mistakes.

I and my colleagues tried to solve it in many ways. We wrote new tools like chatbots, trying to simplify UI/UX and reduce response time. We tried to optimise processes and reduce bureaucracy. But nothing was a perfect solution. And what the most important — it was not a universal solution. Whenever you change your tool/company/client things come again.

So the only possible way that I see for now is hard but I believe doable:

To start the process of implementing one open common format for time tracking, which can be later adopted by any of the existing tools.

Having a common format it would be easy to import and export timesheets across multiple tools and also simplify migration and communication between them. Of course the format must be implemented. But I believe that developers of tools that we use are also interested that the entire industry becomes more efficient and goes further.

Sometimes it looks for me indeed ridiculous, that we, IT people, who automise processes and increase efficiency, have to do such absurd manual things.

So I started a Github repository with a draft JSON format and would be really appreciated any contribution, so together we can make the industry more efficient.

Please leave your feedback and if you would like to help please start/contribute or share the idea with others.