Administrivia

[dtm]

One of the things about my job I truly loathe (and really, I have a pretty good job, all-in-all) is tracking my time.

Until now, we've used time tracking software from a company called Journyx, and it's been annoying, because among other things:

• I have to enter my time at all. This is really the biggest hassle, since I don't remember to do it and later have no idea what I spent my time on a week ago.
  
• I could only enter five different activites before having to send the page back to the webserver and wait 30 seconds or so.
  
• The categories for time spent were in a menu tree and it was sometimes difficult to figure out what category a given activity fit into. Also, the javascript-based menu tree was a little bit clumsy to work with (if you accidentally chose the wrong branch, you had to drill down to a leaf before you could go back up).
  

Well, now we've been ordered to switch to a new, home-grown time tracking system. Naturally, they took everything bad about using Journyx and made it worse:

• I have to enter my time, and now it's a higher level of management that the "you must enter your time" directive comes from. (and therefore harder to ignore) I think it has something to do with Sarbanes-Oxley.
  
• I have to fire up internet explorer in order to do it, even though I do all my regular browser stuff in Mozilla. Journyx was cross-browser.
  
• I can only enter one task at a time before sending the page back to the server. On the plus side, I only have to wait 5 seconds or so, unless I'm modifying a task I already entered, in which case I get to wait 30 seconds again. We'll see how this changes as the system experiences more load.
  
• The categories have been flattened into one humoungous drop-down list. The multiple levels are taken care of by concatenating the name, but since that would make things too long, EVYTHGS-BN-ABRVD.
  
• Each task I enter only covers an amount of time on one day. In Journyx, I could enter a task and then say "I spent 6 hours on this on Monday, 2 on Tuesday, and 2 on Thursday."
  

I really hate administrative details. If they had an interface where I could just type in what I'd done for a week (let me use the keyboard and not just point-and-click through a scroll box three pages tall) and let the software sort it out, it might be tolerable, but this stuff is just extra pain.

Update: And an hour after the new system is announced, the load of everyone logging in to enter their time for yesterday and today has crashed the system. (the announcement sent today read in part "I need everyone (who has been entering time into JournyX) to start to enter their time into TCS as of February 1st")

Comments

[tayefeth.livejournal.com]

Ouch. I'm sorry. 'Productivity' measuring software can be written to be less of a pain in the ass, but it does take a programmer who gives a shit...