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Workers Are Bad at Filling Out Timesheets, and It Costs Billions a Day

January 12, 2015


You probably spend a huge amount of your time at work on email — most of us do. And we’re pretty aware of the costs: distraction, intrusion into our personal lives, and so on. But for consultants, lawyers, and others who work in professional services, there’s often another, more direct cost: the loss of billable hours.

That’s the conclusion of a recent study from AffinityLive, a company that specializes in professional services automation. Surveying 500 workers last summer, the firm calculated that each person lost $50,000 per year in revenue due to insufficient tracking of emails with clients and others. In total, “almost 40% of respondents reported never tracking time spent reading and answering email,” with only 33% of respondents saying they “always” or “often” do. Consider these numbers when you realize that “more than half of survey respondents indicated that their employer directly uses timesheets to bill clients hourly or determine retainer amounts.”

Taking into account the size of the professional services sector, the company estimates that the U.S. economy is losing 50 million hours, or $7.4 billion a day, in productivity.

The research, and AffinityLive’s plan to deliver automated tracking solutions, derived from conversations CEO Geoff McQueen was having with others in the professional services industry (he ran such a business at the time). “Their problems were the same,” he says. “They would be working harder and longer and wouldn’t know whether or not it had been financially worthwhile until a couple of weeks after the end of the month.” And while it was sometimes easy to identify early on the projects that were big winners or major disasters, everything in the middle was muddy. “We really had no visibility as to what the heck was going on,” according to McQueen.

Part of this difficulty derives from the fact that the way we work now makes it trickier to track exactly how much time we’re spending on projects. McQueen points out that, prior to email, correspondence would generally come in via mail or fax. “You’d spend 15 or 20 minutes reading this letter and thinking about what you’re going to do,” he says. “Then you might draft your reply, which might take 45 minutes to an hour. You’re basically dealing with a round-trip time of an hour. If it took you, let’s say, two minutes to keep track of that, you’re basically dealing with 3% overhead time to keep track of the work you did.”

This model changed entirely with email, McQueen argues. People often deal with a couple hundred emails a day, with most interaction taking 20 to 30 seconds, and occasional longer responses of around five minutes. “If it then takes you three minutes to go into your timesheet program to record the time, you’ve gone from spending 3% of the work unit in administrative overhead to spending 60% in overhead.” Not to mention the fact that it’s entirely impractical to log activity bit by bit every time you answer an email. It is, as the AffintyLive report states, “a disconnected afterthought and not part of any other systems people use to get their work done.”

McQueen says many people deal with this by spending Friday afternoons trying to remember what they did over the course of a week in order to fill out their timesheets. This is obviously not a very accurate method. Data collected by AffinityLive shows that people who fill out timesheets once a day reported being more accurate in their record-keeping than those who fill them out once a week or less. (And the people who said they don’t track their time? They’re required to submit timesheets by their company but are essentially guessing at whatever they did that day or week.)


According to Sanford DeVoe, an associate professor of organizational behavior and HR management at the Rotman School of Management, it’s especially difficult to recall time spent on email for a couple of reasons. “Email occupies that liminal space between tasks, and it hurts a lot that we often write and receive personal emails while we’re reading or composing a response to a client. That integration between the personal and professional makes it seem like it’s not a task you’re supposed to keep track of,” he says. “If we spend time writing an internal memo, it’s much clearer in our mind that we’re spending a specific amount of time on a work task.”

When it comes to why we’re stuck between a new way of working and an old way of recording it, McQueen places a lot of blame on the technology sector and, particularly, the user-unfriendliness of enterprise software. Not surprisingly, he points to his company’s software as a potential solution. It basically automates a lot of the inputting for you based on what’s in your calendar and who you’re emailing, using these signals to construct a record of a person’s work during the day. In the future, he imagines being able to detect whether a cell number is a client or if you’re meeting with a client based on your geographic location. The software would then automatically log the number of minutes you’re on the phone or in a client’s office.

If it seems far-reaching when it comes to employees’ privacy, he says the software only takes into account things you do using your work email account and with work contacts. And it has the side effect of exposing people who have “become really good at convincing their organization that they’re doing work when, in fact, they’re not.”

But are there any pitfalls to this type of tracking minutiae? Maybe, if you don’t approach the task thoughtfully and with the right technology. “The biggest danger with having managers or employees focus too much on how they are spending their time is that activities that aren’t ‘billable’ are given short shrift,” says DeVoe. “There is a large academic literature attesting to the importance of organizational citizenship behavior — all the things that technically aren’t part of your job but are nevertheless key to organizational success.”

In addition, being too attuned to how employees are spending their time can be psychologically problematic, explains DeVoe. “When people are billing their time at high rates, laboratory experiments I’ve conducted show that we become much more impatient with our time. This obviously has negatives in terms of greater time stress, but inducing impatience can have downstream effects across a wide set of domains, such as making people more financially short-sighted.”

Lastly, it can have an impact on your personal life and worldview. “Having this monetary value on time can make you more stingy with your free time, less likely to stop and smell the roses, and more likely to focus on economic factors when you’re evaluating your overall life satisfaction,” he says.

Technology can help, says DeVoe, because it can precisely and unobtrusively measure your activity without many of the psychological pitfalls. As a best practice, companies should “explicitly consider monetary value when they are making habitual or permanent decisions about how people will spend their time in the organization, but avoid practices that repeatedly remind them of the monetary value of their time.”

In other words, you want the right information to help you allocate the organization’s time, without the daily psychological burden of gathering it.
