21 activities missing from your timesheets

In the course of the jobs we do, a lot of us have to fill in timesheets. Billable hours are important, and HR needs to be able to track what you’re up to every day. Most timesheet systems require that eight hours be filled every day or they are considered incomplete, and, while it’s possible to allocate most of your time to clients, there are also those bits and pieces of time that just don’t fit in anywhere.

So you end up sitting and pondering the eternal question of whether what you did that day should be classified as “administration”, “archiving” or plain old “lunch”, and perhaps wished that there were more accurate descriptors available to choose from. (For instance, it has always bothered me that there is no category for “thinking” on timesheets, and there really should be. Thinking is important — as a strategist, a large proportion of my work consists of thinking — and we should allow time for it.) And what happens when you get stuck in traffic or can’t find parking? You can hardly bill that to a client.

So there is clearly a need for additional timesheet categories. Here is a list of 21 activities that should be listed in timesheets, but aren’t:

1. Bathroom breaks. These add up and you can hardly classify them as “archiving”.
2. Smoke breaks.
3. Skinnering (which is the same as a smoke break, but for non-smokers).
4. Thinking (see above).
5. Making coffee and/or tea. Looking for teaspoons would fall under this category.
6. Waiting for the microwave.
7. Playing pool and/or fuzball (a substantial chunk of daily activity in most ad agencies).
8. Looking for the right boardroom because the change of venue wasn’t reflected in Outlook.
9. Waiting for lifts.
10. Spontaneous conversations in the passageway.
11. Reading celebrity and/or sports news online.
12. Decorating/personalisation of cubicles.
13. Sitting stuck in traffic between meetings.
14. Looking for parking.
15. Signing toll-fee petitions.
16. Listening politely to salespeople trying to flog new cellphone contracts and saying no.
17. Chat/ Skype/ BBM.
18. Looking at lolcats.
19. Networking (which is a euphemism for time spent on Facebook and Twitter).
20. Arbing around aimlessly and, of course,

21. Watching the twirling beach ball of doom. Mac users will know what I am talking about.

There are probably more of them, and depending on the kind of environment you work in, some will be more applicable than others. Whichever categories you choose, you can rest assured in the knowledge that the day you describe in your timesheet is at least a tiny little bit closer to the day you actually experienced. “Administration” se voet.