It’s Friday at 4pm. Half the team’s got their coat on. The other half are comparing weekend plans. You open the timesheet system and see exactly what you expected to see.... Nothing....
…Or three entries from the one person who actually fills it in, bless them.
At this point you go one of two ways.
You become the timesheet police. Chasing people on Monday, passive aggressive Slack messages, “friendly reminders” that aren’t friendly. You get the data, but you also get eye rolls, resentment, and numbers people made up in two minutes to get you off their back.
Or you give up, delete the app, cancel the subscription, go back to gut feel and hope for the best. Not ideal either.
Most agencies I speak to have been through this exact cycle. Tried it, hated it, binned it. But the need doesn’t go away. You still can’t see which projects are on track and which ones have gone over. You still can’t tell if a project’s in trouble until it’s already finished, and by then there’s nothing you can do about it.
I’m starting a project with a creative agency next week. The brief was clear: “Tell us which projects are on track and which ones aren’t. But if it involves timesheets, we’re not interested.”
Constraints like that are my favourite kind. Because they force you to think differently about the problem.
And the problem was never that your team won’t track their time. It’s that timesheets were the wrong mechanism for capturing it.
There are ways to get 80% of the data without asking anyone to fill anything in.
If you’ve been through the timesheet cycle in your agency - which camp did you end up in? The police or the quitter?