Time Tracking Isn’t the Problem. What You Do With It Is.

Jun 02, 2025

There was a stretch where we were hitting our utilization targets but still missing deadlines. Everyone was tracking their time. We had the data. But something wasn’t right. Projects were slipping, scopes were bloating, and people were constantly context switching. That’s when we stepped back and asked the obvious question:

What are we actually doing with the time data?

Yes, we had hours logged. But we weren’t using it. We weren’t comparing actuals to planned hours. We weren’t reviewing how long similar projects had taken. We weren’t feeding that back into scopes or proposals. There was no loop. Just a lot of time entry and not much learning.

That moment shifted everything for us.

Time tracking isn’t the problem. What you do or don’t do with it is.

We started asking different questions:

  • Are we reviewing actual vs. planned?

  • Are the right people doing the right work?

  • Are we building scopes around real effort, or what we wish things took?

  • Are our senior team members spending too much time on work others could do just because it’s easier?

That last one was a big one. We found situations where someone had done the same task hundreds of times, and kept doing it, while someone else on the team was ready to learn, grow, and take it on. But no one was looking at how time was being distributed across clients, stages, and team members.

We realized that without reviewing time data at the project level, we were constantly recycling the same mistakes. Missed estimates. Lopsided responsibilities. Misaligned scopes. Talent underutilized. Senior people overbooked. Time tracking had become something we did out of obligation not something we used as a tool.

So we changed that.

We started reviewing time not just by the numbers, but by the story behind the numbers. Where the work was going. Who was doing it. Whether it made sense for them to be doing it. And whether the structure of our scopes even matched reality.

And then we acted on it. We started shifting responsibilities, tweaking scopes, rethinking discovery and estimation. We brought our delivery and operations leads into reviews and actually used the time data to improve.

We also began looking at client-level and phase-level patterns:

  • Were we always over on a certain type of deliverable?

  • Were specific clients consistently eating more hours than planned?

  • Were we loading the wrong parts of projects with too many senior team members?

  • Was there hidden non-billable time showing up again and again but never being tracked properly?

The more we looked, the more we saw. Time tracking became a diagnostic tool. Not just a record.

Time tracking only becomes useful when it feeds learning and learning drives action.

Without that loop, you just have data with no direction.

This wasn’t a software problem. It was a habit problem. And changing how we approached the habit unlocked better planning, better resourcing, and better delivery.

It also gave people back their time because when you know where your hours are going, you can protect them better. You can delegate more intentionally. You can see when you're too deep in the weeds.

Because hitting 80% utilization doesn’t matter if it’s the wrong 80%.

That was the shift for us. Time tracking stopped being a box to check and started becoming one of our most valuable sources of insight.

If you're tracking time but still feel like you're always chasing clarity, the problem might not be your tools. It might be what you're not doing with the data.

Richard