About

Fifty notes on time tracking, written from the operator's side.

Who this is for

Whoever has been asked to deploy something and needs to know which of the four purposes they are serving. Whoever has to assess it — legal, HR, a works council. And, indirectly, whoever fills it in, whose cooperation is the data collection mechanism and whose interests are treated here as a design input rather than an obstacle.

How the notes are written

The purpose before the product. What each of the four uses needs, and where they conflict, before any question of tooling.

Methods you can run. Where a note says something is measurable, it says how, usually from data you already hold.

Limits stated plainly. Two notes are entirely about questions the timesheet cannot answer and where to send them instead.

The uncomfortable findings included. Most timesheet data is reconstructed from memory. Individual targets remove supervision and training from the record. Write-offs are usually a pricing finding attributed to a person. Utilisation read as good is frequently a warning.

The boundary

Recording hours protects the worker. In much of Europe it is a legal obligation on the employer, and the system must be accessible to the person it describes.

Monitoring activity during those hours is a different thing, with its own obligations, and citing the recording duty as a basis for it is inaccurate.

These notes do not describe covert monitoring, screenshot configuration, or how to make an activity score more persuasive. They appear only to explain why they should not be built — and requests to improve such features are declined for the same reason. A better version of the thing is still the thing.

No benchmarks

No accuracy figures or utilisation targets from elsewhere are quoted. They depend on the work, the recording method and the sector, and a number from another organisation predicts nothing about yours.

About this domain

This address previously belonged to a photographer's portfolio.

None of that material is here and none of it should be. The photographs were the work, they belong to the person who took them, and in any case they were never in the archive: every image was served from the hosting platform's own network and none of it was captured.

Every previous address returns a clear "gone" response rather than redirecting to unrelated material.