Time tracking with categories, Basecamp style
September 30th, 2005
37 Signals stirred things up recently when they unveiled the time tracking facility to Basecamp, their popular project management system. We at Studio 24 have been using Basecamp to help organise our hectic workload over the past few months and have found it to be an excellent tool. The time tracking feature just makes it all that much better.
We all use tools in different ways, for us we tend to track time via categories so we can match entries up with the original budget for the project. So an initial gripe of mine was the lack of categories for tracking time. And from reading the Basecamp forums it seems I am not alone.
However, there are a couple of obvious ways to do this. The first involves entering the exact name for your category into the description field for each time item. Then when you export a Time report into a program like Excel you can easily sort on description to analyse time across different areas.
The obvious disadvantage of this method is different people will always type different things. Without an exact match you can’t really group time entries together. Plus you loose any useful extra descriptive information. So I had a think, and came up with bending To Do lists to my will…
First create a To Do list template. Name it something obvious and eye catching, like ‘TIME TRACKING’. Then add the basic categories you need for all projects. We use Project Management, Design, Production, Programming and QA/Testing.
That’s the template set up - easy, eh. Now browse to your favourite project and add a new To Do list. Select the time tracking template you just created and enable time tracking for the list.
For good measure you can add any custom categories for this project (or remove any you don’t need). Notice I tend to write everything for this To Do list in capitals, this is so it shouts out at me and is easy to spot among any other To Do lists for this project.
The final step is entering the time data. Simply browse to your project, go to To Do lists, find the time tracking list and click on the clock icon next to the relevant category. You can still add a custom description to aid future analysis.
Here’s how it looks exported into Excel. You can click on the image to see a larger version.
As with many things in Basecamp, it’s nice and simple. Well, that’s how we make use of Basecamp’s new and very useful time tracking tools.
Entry Filed under: web stuff
5 Comments
1. Alexandre Simard | October 4th, 2005 at 6:10 am
Looks good! I do not have access to the Time Tracking feature, so I want to thank you for taking the time to give me sneak peak inside of it.
Just one comment, though. Aren’t you using To-Do Items as Categories? You’re kind of perverting the model here, as the acual task is now in a Note, and probably duplicated from another To-Do item. Does BaseCamp export the To-Do Titles too? I would use these as categories, I think.
2. Administrator | October 10th, 2005 at 12:28 pm
yep - we are indeed using the To Do list items as categories.
I wanted a system to make it easy to add time to a set category and not have to worry about mispelling anything. This keeps it easier to do quick reports in Excel.
We still use To Do lists for individual items we need to get done (and track milestones), but personally I’m not too worried about having each and every task detailed in the time tracking. I just want to see the bigger picture.
Remember Basecamp is kept intentionally simple. This means people find methods to do things their way - this is just one example of that.
3. Frank Cowell | December 3rd, 2005 at 8:12 pm
HI there!
Is there a way to export to a CSV for ALL time tracking in Base Camp? Let’s say we have 15 clients each month (we work with them each month on retainer) and I want to get one export - is this possible? Otherwise I have to go in to each ‘project’ and export to csv and then copy/paste all of them together in Excel.
Any ideas?
Thanks!
-Frank
4. Administrator | December 5th, 2005 at 4:53 pm
Frank - I don’t believe so. The global data export function only exports messages and comments ( https://your-basecamp-url/global/xml_dump )
We just run time repotrs on each project and tend to analyse these manually at present.
It would be nice if Basecamp made an API available so users could interrogate data in the way they wished to. Would certainly make the application more “Web 2.0″
Simon
5. Betty Hardin | January 26th, 2006 at 9:12 am
In response to Frank - Basecamp recently released an update that DOES provide the abiilty to export the entire time tracking table. Just click on the TIME tab on the main page.
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