In an ideal world, your boss measures you on your productivity – the quality and volume of the work you do – rather than the number of hours you’re seated at your desk. But unfortunately the latter is a much easier method for some managers. If your manager is willing to let you telecommute, but has concerns about how to measure your time, you can propose to him that you’ll log your time, so he can see how it’s being spent.

A time-tracking log doesn’t have to be complicated or sophisticated. If your company doesn’t already have something you can create your own in a simple spreadsheet or Word document. Attached is an example you might want to use or copy: time-tracking-sample.xls

The categories you use will vary depending on the kind of job you have. I recommend not having too many categories or it can become overwhelming both for you to fill in and for your manager to review. Ten categories not counting the “miscellaneous” ones is probably plenty. As your job changes over time you can take items out that you find you’re not doing anymore or add new items.

Here are some ideas for the kinds of categories you may want to put in your timesheet.:

• Projects: List all the individual projects you’re working on. You may be entirely dedicated to one large project (if so, are there sub-projects within it you could list where you split your time across) or you may be working on a number of different ones.
• Role work: If you perform multiple roles throughout the course of your day, list these. For instance, if part of your job is to create presentations for your manager to use during talks he has to give, list that as a category. Or perhaps you’re the graphics expert on your team and you often have to whip up a quick graphic image for someone on your team.
• Measured goals: Think about what kinds of things you are measured on at the end of the year. What formal goals has your manager laid out for you for this year? For instance, if you are expected to generate a certain number of sales leads each month, put in a category for “lead generation” activities. If you’re being measured on successfully reducing the helpdesk call volume for your service, put in some categories like “helpdesk call analysis”, “service usability improvements”, etc.
• Miscellaneous: You’ll need a few miscellaneous categories that you don’t use very often but probably apply to just about everyone reading this article in one way or another:
  • Administrative: Use this for time spent in general things like attending your boss’ team staff meetings. But try to keep use of it to a minimum. Managers don’t like to see more than a few hours a week going into a general administrative bucket as they can’t really tell what you’re doing and lots of time on “administrative” tasks mean you’re not getting work done on your actual projects.
  • Training or Development: Use this category if you need to take training classes or spend some of your time learning a new aspect of your skillset.
  • Time Away: Use this track vacation or sick time.

Track your time in hours. For instance, I spent 2 hours on this activity or 3 hours on that. You can list .5 if you like but don’t split hairs down to the minutes. The idea is to give your manager the big picture, not the fine-tuned details.

You can choose whether to fill in your timesheet once at the end of the week or to fill it in at the end of each day. It may seem easier to just deal with it once/week but it can be hard to remember exactly where you’ve spent your time all week by late Friday afternoon. Looking at the meetings on your calendar or skimming through the sent items in your email can help. Try filling it out at different frequencies and see what works best for you. If you need to, put a daily or weekly reminder in your calendar, towards the end of the day – to help you remember to do this.

On a related note, if you spend all or most of your time on the phone (perhaps you take support calls for your company’s product or service, routed to your home number) – you can make a call log, similar to a time log. Track the start/end time of each call, who you spoke with, and what the general topic/nature of the call was. My suggestion: buy a phone that will display the time you spent on the call when you hang up!

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