The 40-Hour Conundrum: How to Talk With Your Team About Time Tracking
Key Takeaways
- The expectation isn't 40 tracked hours. It's that all working time gets tracked, and lunch, breaks, and vacation don't.
- Gray calls time tracking a capital allocation problem. Your capital is your time, and the data exists to put it where the return is highest.
- Start by asking the person to estimate their hours for the last two weeks and write it down. Then track everything for a week with RescueTime running alongside.
- Two-minute tasks go into a daily time tracking bucket. 15 minutes a day in there is fine. Three or four hours a day means real work isn't getting attributed.
- The worst version of time tracking is a target, stress, and no decisions made with the data. Instead, sit down weekly for a month and coach where the time goes.
- Monthly or quarterly, compare time spent to revenue by department, client, and service line, then tell the team what changed. ZenPilot repriced its Blueprint this way.
Kuba Grajcar hosted this one, and his guest was Gray MacKenzie, ZenPilot’s founder and the show’s previous host. There’s no outside guest. The episode came out of a message an agency CEO sent Gray: his most diligent project manager had logged 22 hours through Thursday, said 40 was impossible, and wanted to know whether lunch and breaks count.
The expectation is all working time, not 40 hours
Gray said the same question had come up so many times that this message was “the straw that broke the camel’s back, but in a good way.” His first reply to the CEO reframed the target. His second was simpler: no, don’t track lunches, personal time, or vacation.
The expectation… isn’t that we track 40 hours of time. The expectation is that we track all of our working time. And so that’s just a different frame to give folks: if you’re working, start the timer. When you’re done working, stop the timer.
Time tracking is a capital allocation problem
Gray asked Kuba why agencies track time at all. Kuba’s honest answer was that hours show he’s present and working. Gray said that’s exactly how most team members read it, log 40 to prove you worked 40, and it’s the wrong frame.
This is just a capital allocation problem. Your capital is your time that you have, and I want to allocate that in the highest return ways possible. So that’s the real purpose behind time tracking, and we need to be really intentional and clear in articulating that to team members, because many cultures have been: you get paid for the hours that you work.
Capacity also changes with the season of life (60 to 65 hours a week felt fine in Gray’s pre-kids twenties and doesn’t with four kids). A minimum for full-time people is reasonable; proving effort with a number is not the point.
What to say to that project manager this week
Gray’s practical answer for the CEO started with a baseline, not a rule.
How many hours do you think you worked? How many hours do you think you worked last week? How many hours do you think you worked the week before? Write those down just so we’ve got those as a baseline… When someone says, “Yeah, I don’t really know, but it’s a lot,” that’s not good enough. Come up with some estimation and tell me what it is. You’ve got to commit to something here in this conversation to be a good faith conversation.
Step two: track every working minute next week with RescueTime running in the background, then compare the two totals. Lawyers and accountants track every minute and bill for it, Gray said, so it’s obviously possible. For the two-minute tasks a PM bounces between, he uses a daily time tracking bucket: 15 minutes a day in it is fine, three or four hours a day means real work isn’t being attributed to projects.
The worst version of time tracking, and the weekly review instead
The worst thing to ask people is to track time, give them a target to track towards, have them stress about it or feel like “I need to be showing up at work during these hours,” and they’re more concerned about hitting the start and stop on the timer or hitting a certain number than actually doing good work in the time that they’ve got available, and then you’re not doing anything with that data. That’s the worst of all things… You would be way better off just throwing out time tracking altogether.
The alternative is a month of weekly reviews between manager and team member.
You probably need to take a month, and on a weekly basis, Kuba, you and I are going to sit down. We’re going to look at your time report for last week, and this is my opportunity as your manager to kind of redirect and say, well, you spent 15 hours editing the podcast. This is not that impactful out of the grand scheme of things that we’re doing here, so we’ve got to condense this way down and spend more time here or there.
The cadence loosens as the skill builds: weekly, then every two weeks, then only when someone feels stuck. The first few honest reports will make people feel guilty, so over-communicate that this is coaching, not a warning.
What the business does with the data
The other half is a report Gray looks at monthly or quarterly: time spent versus revenue earned by department, client, and service line. What changes because of it has to be shared back, or the team stops seeing the point. His example was ZenPilot’s own Blueprint process, repackaged at a higher point value once the hours showed the old price couldn’t hold, and the team thanked for the data that made it a real decision instead of an emotional one. The same data shows who should be doing what (if a LinkedIn post takes Gray four times as long as Kuba, Kuba should ghostwrite it) and which processes need to get faster. At the individual level, one finding shows up almost every time.
The amount of time that someone estimates they spend in communication and the amount of time that they actually spend in communication as a bucket - thinking of what to write, asking AI to help them write it, looking for data on stuff, trying to pull reporting, and then just monitoring email… is almost always a much larger time waste. That and Slack, any chat tool in the internal team. That’s almost always above what folks would estimate.
Too much communication usually points to expectations that weren’t set up front or a project management setup that can’t show what’s on track. Gray’s four-step summary for the CEO closes the video.