The 40-Hour Conundrum: Rethinking Time Tracking for Modern Agencies

Hello, hello, hello everyone, and welcome back to Agency Journey. I'm your host, Kuba Graejar, and with me on the call today is Gray McKenzie Zenpilot, CEO and founder, previous Agency Journey host Gray, welcome back to the show.

Thank you, Kuba Kuba. If I had, I feel like I've got the same level of energy you have, but for me it comes out very monotone, like this and not. Hello, hello, hello, everyone. That's awesome. You bring the good.

There's something. It's like I started doing it on a whim. I think it was like my second or third live stream ever that I did where it kind of came out and I don't know, it's instinctual. It's come out ever since. I can hardly help it when it happens.

That's awesome.

But yes, yes, I like to start on that kind of note because I'm always excited to record and especially with you, Gray. We've had so many productive conversations thus far and, you know, we promised the watchers and listeners more great Gray episodes on the show. We're having one of those today. Very exciting topic for today. Today we're going to talk about time tracking. You know, the way this feels to me is like we're going to be talking about like the elephant in the room when it comes to time tracking, the 40 hour conundrum, so to speak, when it comes to time tracking. And it's also prompted by a conversation that you shared with me, you know, by a comment that you got from one of your connections. And I thought to set the context, maybe I'll just read the comment that you got and we'll launch into it that way. Does that make sense? Great, I'm going to go for it. So one of your connections, an agency CEO, sent you a message and basically we looked at it and we were like, okay, we're recording a podcast about it. The message went something like this. Hi, Greg, I'm wondering if you have some quick thoughts with this. My most diligent project manager said, says that logging 40 hours per week is impossible. He showed me his timesheet for this week. He's at 22 hours around that through Thursday end of day. And he said he's says here busting his butt and working at night too. And I believe him based on his output and a long history of knowing him. So, you know, the trust piece is there is kind of my additional commentary there. And this project manager also wanted to know whether lunch or breaks are included in the 40 hours. And your connection here admits I never really thought through these issues. If you have any quick thoughts or resources to point me to, I'd appreciate it. Well, I hope they'll be happy to hear that we're recording a whole episode about this, just this one case. And I'll say from a perspective of a person that has had jobs, this always struck me as there's a bit of a tension between this expectation of 40 hours, what actually happens throughout the day. Great. How do we start unpacking this?

Yeah, this is like the straw that broke the camel's back, but in a good way. This convert, like the exact same question and conversation has just come up so many different times. And I was like, man, we've never recorded about this. I'm going to do it. So I sent my friend back just a couple quick things around it, like, hey, what is the. And my first two pieces of advice were, hey, is you're tracking your time in ClickUp. The expectation is set for people 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. Like, if you're working, hit this, you know, start the timer when you're done working, you know, stop the timer. Obviously, like task specific. And I think this brings up a really good point that we might dig into here as well, is like, hey, a project manager might be jumping back and forth between 10 different projects. How are they tracking their time and accurately attributing it? So we'll walk through those questions as well. But that was the first thing. And then obviously the second piece of advice was, no, don't track your lunches, don't track your personal time, you're out of office, your vacation, whatever else. I'm not interested in time tracked around that. I'm interested in this. So that brings us to the big question of like, why are we tracking time to begin with? So maybe that's the right place to start, maybe it's not. But I think that piece is. Is kind of surprising to me sometimes unquestioned, like, hey, the industry standard is we track our time. So I'm going to have my people track their time instead of like, why are we doing this and what are we actually getting from it? If someone asked you, why are we tracking time, what would your answer be?

Well, I mean, I haven't thought about this deeply, but my kind of surface level thoughts would be, this is how I am assessed in terms of showing up. Like, you know, and maybe it's a cultural thing. But for me, you know, part of it is like being present at work. You know, put it bluntly, like, I measure that, you know, whether I'm at work. Feel free to kind of demolish this, okay? But surface level, knee jerk reaction is like, am I at work enough hours to be considered, you know, active and working? I think this is what comes to my mind.

I think that's the perfect response because I think that's how most team members take it, is, am I. I need to log 40 hours to show that I'm working 40 hours. I want people to know that I'm putting in the hours and the time. And from my perspective, like, I'm doing this to best shape the decisions that we as a company make. Like, I want time tracking data so that we can better shape our offerings, how we price them, who's working on what, we can dig into, what that stuff looks like. But largely also so that I can, as your direct manager, shape where you're spending your time. So I want to see where's it going. And a great episode to listen to that mentions, this is the one with Mark Abbott, who is the CEO at 90. He came on and shared about, hey, and this is an expectation they set in the hiring process. You're going to track on average 40 to 45 hours a week of time. And I want to look at that to be able to recalibrate, reorient you and say, whoa, like this piece, this part of your job is really, like, substantially less impactful than this one over here. It still has to get done, but you're way over indexing in terms of time spent in that area versus another one. So it's really just about, you know, this is just a capital allocation problem. Like, 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 most cultures, many cultures have been. You get power paid for the hours that you work. And so there's natural tie that we all build in our minds between how much time am I working? And that justifies whether I'm doing a good enough job to get paid what I'm getting paid or not or right. Oh, wow. I worked 50 hours this week. Like, I feel like I'm underpaid now because I'm blind. Like, I'm going through a season where it's more. And so, you know, more than 40 hours a week. As the standard. And the reality is everyone's got a different time capacity based on their situation. Whatever else it might look like. I think it's totally fine to have a standard expectation or a minimum threshold around, hey, if you're a full time person, you should be working at least X. That's what Mark has tried to give clarity to the team and said, hey, here's this. But some people in different stages in my life, like I spent a good chunk of the pre kids 20s feeling like, hey, 60, 65 hours a week is pretty. Like I've got flexibility in terms of where I worked at. This feels pretty comfortable. And now a week where I'm working 60 to 65 hours feels like, boy, this is a lot. I'm not showing up as the dad I want to be to four kids and you know, with the other responsibilities I've got in the same way, If I'm working 60, 65 hours a week. And so that is naturally gonna ebb and flow and at some point in time these kids are gonna grow up and be out of the house. And I'd be like, hey, you know what? Yeah, I've got other stuff that I'm interested in doing too, but I'd love to spend more of that time working. So everyone's got a different capacity around what it looks like and we're trying to figure out how to best orient the usage of that time towards the highest return, you know, areas for the business.

So there's a lot of avenues to pursue here. But I did want to stick for a moment to the original message because I'm seeing a little bit of a discrepancy and I would love for you to be able to address it if you can. So to me, part of the problem seems to be that even this 40 hour threshold, and that's kind of part of the original message. Even this 40 hour threshold, even though it is kind of the traditional number, one might say the it doesn't feel necessarily attainable with, you know, and it's like the typical stuff gets mentioned like lunch breaks, toilet breaks. Okay. Or anything else that might be happening or even in a remote work context. You know, this person, this project manager is saying Thursday, the day is over. So like four days are done and I've only got 22 hours logged. I'm not going to log, you know, 18 hours on a Friday. So how do we reconcile that? Like, what's the message with regards to like, is it okay? Is it not okay? I assume it's okay, but like how do you actually talk about this to put team members at ease and to kind of create a logical expectation here.

Yeah, I'll try to. So action items one, share the purpose. Right? Why are we doing this? Do you want that, too? And then how are we going to use this as the other piece? Those are both a little bit more. They're a little less concrete. They are concrete, but they might feel less concrete than what I'm going to say. So the first place that I would go is, hey, track all your time tomorrow on Friday, and you know where you are finding that you're working and there's not a timer running or there's not time being tracked somewhere. Jot that down and we'll look at that together next week.

Okay.

Your goal for next week is to track all of your time. Oh, I'm sorry, I skipped a step here. First thing I would ask is, like, okay, you're busting your butt and you're working at night, too. So 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. And I don't know, you know, to some people they could be busting my butt means that I work 38 hours, and other people that means I work 60 hours. And other people that means I worked 80 hours. And, you know, like, this is kind of all, all, all over the place. But get those written down somewhere and ask. And when someone says, I, yeah, I don't really know, but it's a lot like, that's not good enough. Like, come up with some estimation and tell me what it is. You got to commit to something here in this conversation to be a good faith conversation. Next, go install rescue time or something.

I love that one. Yeah. Like that. Yeah, talk about it. Talk about it.

Yeah. So your goal for next week, Mr. Or Mrs. Project Manager, is to track every single working hour and think of a lawyer. Somehow they are magically able to track every single minute of time that happens. And they're incredibly good at paying billing for or an accountant. Like, they're incredibly good. You look at utilization rates, and for whatever reason, you know, in the marketing agency or digital agency space, we're willing to tolerate way lower utilization rates than pretty much all of the other professional services. So it's obviously possible. Like, so first we've got to frame, hey, this is possible. Then I want you to track every minute that you're working next week. And I realize there's some inefficiency that comes with that, but I'm willing to get that to be able to help you, you know, allocate your time and energy in a higher impact or, or better way and have visibility to what's happening. And then we're going to look at together and you don't have to share all your Rescue Time details with me, but we're going to share the categories together and we're going to look at what does Rescue Time say, which is you do not turn it off. Like, let it run 24. 7 on your computer. And Rescue Time, for anyone who's not familiar, tracks your screen, auto categorizes your time into these different categories. You can change, you know, by default it'll put, you know, Instagram into social media and whatever else the category is. You might be running ads or something. And so, you know, business.meta.com, shouldn't actually go there. It should go into whatever client services or whatever. You can create custom categories or anything else. And this is free, by the way, to trial it. There's a paid version, but there's a free version that you can also use at RescueTime.

Yeah, I used it for years actually. Yeah, I liked how you mentioned there's categories in terms of like what kind of program it is. But also it had at the time I was using it also it was marked as either productive or unproductive time. So I could mark certain sites as productive or unproductive. Unproductive was marked in a very clear red and the game was as little red as possible, you know. And you know, that data really helped to create visibility clarity into like where my time was going.

Right. Super helpful. I still use is helpful to just see like, oh, where's my time actually going? And you know, am I lying to myself about how productive I'm unbear or not productive. And by the way, for all of this stuff, like even the color red, a lot of this stuff becomes emotional pretty quickly and you start to feel the guilt or the shame of like, oh man, I'm not. I wish I was more productive. And this is the classic like gap and gain framework. It's not like we're just trying to identify right now and so we've got to take some of the pressure off of ourselves to like 100% productive. I don't know any like, I don't think Elon Musk, based on his ex attributes, I think a lot of people would say he's creating. A lot of people have like very polarizing person, obviously, but there's a lot of value that's been created by the companies that he's been a part of. But I don't think you look at him and I, I don't think he's getting 100% productive on rescue time for sure. And that's fine. So it's not, it's not like, can I get 40 out of 40 hours into the productive category. It's like, how do I maximize the impact of the time that I do have and recognize what's working, what's not working, and, and work to improve. So I would track that and then I'd see what the, you know, what's the spread between the time that you tracked and what rescue time has for your total time working, productive and overall time. And all we're trying to do is just surface like, hey, there's, there's a gap here. And then normally when there's a feeling of hey, I can't track this time, it's because we often are not detailed enough in our, like, we don't, we don't have a clear way in our project management software. So you think of ClickUp and where am I tracking my time? Every. The beautiful thing about tracking time in ClickUp and getting the reporting back off of it is I'm not working in ClickUp for the project management, but then going to Harvest or any of the other platforms, toggl or anything else to go track my time. It's all living right in the same place, which ultimately means there's no extra mapping that I have to do to make this project talk to that project and oh, whoops, we got out of sync here or whatever else. So even when you've got the extensions installed and you've got the harvest time tracking UI right inside ClickUp, you're still not going to have the ability to use both clickups, time estimates and time tracking and harvest forecast and time tracking without doing some extra work. So the beautiful thing about having it there is that it's all there. But the flip side is you're tracking time to a specific task, so there's got to be some place that that's associated. So it's either client work or it's internal work. And then what project is that tied to? And so that means you've got to create some structure around, well, where am I actually tracking my time? Often in a project manager type role, it feels like, hey, I'm going through all my emails or I'm going through all these messages back and forth with clients in our ticketing software. And on average, it takes me two minutes to look at each of them. Like, I'm not going to go track time two minutes at a time everywhere. So you've got to create some threshold or benchmark of where does that go. And the hack or the workaround a lot of times is that folks will create like a client management area and then there's a, you know, hey, track just your quick, your, your morning, like account checks. If you're running ads or something, your time goes here. Any of those. We often call those time tracking buckets. Like, where's a bucket that you're throwing stuff? It recurs every day. And, you know, some days you are tracking five minutes, some days that's 30 minutes. It just kind of depends on what's going on. I'm totally fine with that approach as long as that number is relatively low.

Yeah.

When we start talking about, you know, now four hours of the day are showing up in there, you got to be like, well, hey, there's got to be some. You didn't spend four hours clicking back and forth between messages. I hope there was some. Like, no, I spent 10 minutes clicking back and forth between messages and then these two wound up taking me 90 minutes a piece. Well, okay, well, now we're, now we're at a point where we've got to track that accurately to the, to the project. Because I can't just. It's. I'm totally fine charging 15 minutes a day to the game. Like, hey, this is, I'm not, this is not going to any specific client. It's just part of the, like, you're balancing between 15 different clients. And I realize that that's just going to happen. And I'm not charging everybody for a minute every single day. At some point we might get to that. You know, we might get to a level where we want to figure out, hey, yeah, we've got to charge you an extra 30 minutes because that's what it takes over the course of a month. But today I'm not that worried about it. But that does have a huge impact when that becomes three, four hours every day or going into. It's not specifically tied to any project. So totally fine to use some of that. You just need to pay attention to it and walk through it. And then this all leads into like the last step of what are we doing with that data? And then continuing to measure. So 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. Like, that's the worst of all things. You're not making decisions about how you price or package future work. You're not making decisions about how you staff certain teams or move people into their sweet spots or otherwise. You're not making any decisions about how that person should be allocating their time. That's the worst thing to do. Like, you might as well. You. You would be way better off just throwing out time tracking altogether. So the flip side is we have to be using that data in those ways. And I think the best practices here are 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. Like, this podcast isn't even that, you know, like, this is not that impactful out of the grand scheme of things that we're doing here. So we got to condense this way down and spend more time here or there. And we're just trying to build. And as you keep going, just like any coach or consultant, as somebody gets more, you know, it starts off as like, hey, more instructive, and then becomes more, I'm instructing you on how to think and how to make better decisions around it. Like, oh, right. How does that line up with where you anticipated time going? We can talk about that other stuff to do with the data, but I'll. I'll pause there.

Okay, so before I summarize, I have to say, like, this is something that I also learned working with you. I didn't have this perspective before, but now I definitely see it as, like, I have a budget of my time, and I'm being trusted, you know, as a team member here at Zenpilot, and I think a lot of other agency team members can relate. I have a budget of my time, and I am trusted to spend that budget well. You know, I may or may not have a, you know, also a financial budget. Right. We do work with some freelancers here and there. Not talking about that, though. Like, the. The capacity that I have is great to have a role where you have some freedom of where and how you apply it where you set kind of higher standards for yourself or you feel like the additional investment of time will lead to a better outcome. But this freedom also comes with the responsibility of okay, if you're investing more here, if you're being more precious about certain types of projects, then that should be reflected on the other side and the impact you should be able to, to justify that. Well, and kind of that's how I learned what I learned, for example, talking with you kind of not on the spot but like outside about kind of where the time is going. So that was, that was great in terms of learning and growth and I just wanted to add that in.

Yeah, I think that piece is huge. Sometimes hours are extremely emotional for certain team members and get a really bad relationships with how they've been used in the past or, and, and so I, I still think hours are like what we're like. We're all looking at our calendars and we've got the X working hours over the course of the week. Like it's not, it's our. It's a clearly limited, relatively similar framework that most folks should use. But it doesn't really matter to me if we go off of hours or if we say, hey, you've got, you know, 15 units of emotional energy to deploy this week or you've got 20 points that you can deploy wherever you can abstract this in whatever way. I think a lot of the abstractions are just kind of games that we play or productivity focused folks try to play to feel more productive or get over whatever else, but I don't really care. It's totally fine to use any of those, but that's the mindset that we're trying to cultivate among the team is here's where we as an organization are going. Here's how you play into that role. Now how do you best allocate that, like take yourself out of the equation. You're buying roughly 40 hours a week of a person with your skill sets, time to go have the biggest impact on the company. How do you develop that? And then in that month or that longer time period or shorter time period that you're staying real close with this person looking at their time tracked, you're trying to coach them and help them build the skill set of making better decision making around where that time goes to have the maximum impact for the business. Yeah, I love that. That starts off on a much more tight like hey, we're going to do this every single week together. That probably broadens out to now, hey, now we're Going to look at this every two weeks. And at some point in time you get to a role with most folks where, hey, when you feel like you're in a slump, let's go back to the basics and let's do this together. But we're not going to go do that audit together. Like, you've built the skill now you audit and you make those decisions for yourself and that'll serve folks for the rest of your life. Then you get the other side. And so I'll pause here and see if you have anything else you want to tackle first. But you've got the other side, which is how are we using that data to make better decisions for the business, not just you personally.

Yeah, I was going to get to that next. That will be our next stop here in this journey. But I just wanted to say what an interesting frame and that kind of like you mentioned two interesting frames and I just kind of wanted to digest them for a second. One is this. You're buying 40 hours of a person's time with your skill set. Super useful for to, to be able to take a step back kind of even towards your own work. Like, you know, as you're talking about this, I'm kind of going through these emotions, being totally honest with you. Like, you know, in certain respects, like there are days when I'm not happy with the amount of hours or, you know, you mentioned, you know, different, different seasons in life. You know, I do have like a 2 year old at home, almost 3 years old. Damn right. So all of this resonates and that frame, really useful for somebody like me to take a step back. That's 1, 2 these units. I know you mentioned this in passing, right. But I do see this like where in a given week I have units of creativity and particularly writing, you know, like how do I spend them in a way where, especially with AI in the mix, right. You spend one, it used to be you spend one unit of creativity, you got one unit of content out of it, right. Maybe if you looked into templates, a few units of content out of it. Now one unit of creativity can yield a lot more content if you're smart about it. And then I've got other units that are kind of more in the vein of something is a complex. I feel like programmers have more points like this than I do. Like something complex, something like I need to really focus, work out a HubSpot workflow or something. And you've got a certain budget of these in the week and how do you spend those and when you break it down. It's not just hours. It's different kinds of hours, different kind of, you know, or. Or the time you can spend in meetings and not hit diminishing returns. So I loved how you kind of mentioned all of that and that. That really expanded my knowledge here. And I don't know if you had anything to add on top of that, but I am also curious about, like, okay, the data. How do you then apply it to the business?

Right. I don't know how common my approach is in terms of time. Like, I do want people to generally be. We've made it a point for most folks to have overlapping schedules so that there's time for calls together. Everybody has some element of overlapping schedules in the business, and for the most part, it's like we're probably 70% or 80% overlapped in terms of work schedules. Generally, as a team, we could certainly get away with less. But it is really helpful when someone has a question or something to get a, you know, a relatively quick response on things. So somebody who's never, you know, who gets their work done in one hour a day and then is never available for other questions or doesn't see him and doesn't respond, that would be a little bit more of a challenge. Outside of that, I don't. I use time tracking in those conversations to try to point, like the energy piece. The points piece that you're talking about are like, hey, how much capacity do I have for this? Or that is way more important to me than the hours worked. So I can't remember the last time that I went and looked back at, like, across the team. What's the, you know, who's the highest and who's the lowest in terms of time track? Like, I really don't have an attachment, and I don't know how common that is, but I would imagine it's not that uncommon today from owners to say, like, I don't really care. Like, I care that this stuff is getting done well. So I see it much more as a tool towards. I know that there's averages across the team. I know there's expectations set. So I know what, like, what can we. And in certain areas, it's more relevant than other areas of the business. But I think a lot of this is like, hey, how do we build healthier, more productive, more profitable team members that lead to that being the culmination as a team?

Right.

So then if we take that to, like, well, what's the. What's the business side of this? Like, what are the decisions we're making, how frequently should be. Should we be looking at it, this piece? I think if you never share this back with team members, this is another demotivating thing that a lot of organizations do is never share. Like, what. What decisions are we actually making off of the data that we have?

Yes. Yeah.

So depending on your size and where you are, like monthly or quarterly for most teams, I want to be looking at how much time is spent versus revenue earned by department, by client, by work category or service line, and potentially by team member as well. Obviously this, you know, if you're going to look at like revenue per hour at a individual level, that's something that every, you know, lawyers or accountants will do because there's like, that's such a high utilization rate. So you just need people in comparable utilization buckets to be able to do any kind of comparison there with that data. Then we're making decisions. And this every single quarter should feed into, hey, what are we now changing in the business? Where are we packaging stuff differently? So the price to work with us in our blueprint process, when we, you know, when that was like the core starting point with everyone, and even now that it's part of our subscriptions and it's in our points catalog, the point value of that has gone up. We've had to repackage that because, hey, there's a ton that we're getting into. This is a really robust process and we're building on here. But when we look at the hours spent, we can't keep doing it at this current rate. Well, if that doesn't get translated back to the team is like, hey, thank you for tracking your time diligently so that we had the data to. To make a better decision here and not just make an emotional, like, I don't know, maybe. Maybe we should charge more for this. Maybe we shouldn't. Like, that piece is super important. The flip side has happened too, where stuff has gone down in terms of what we're charging to folks because, hey, we've got more bandwidth here. And this piece is not as per. Not perceived as. As valuable. And so you're taking both pieces of, like, when it comes to pricing and packaging, what is our actual cost to deliver this? We want to, like, that's a factor here. And then we're marrying this to what's the perceived value on the client side or what's the value that this ultimately generate? And we're pushing both of those. So that's a piece of. It is like the pricing and packaging side and those decisions have to. There's gotta be a hey, thanks to the team for tracking that time to to be able to make better decisions around that stuff. Then you've got the how do we allocate folks time? So this department is or what process? So let me tackle this in two different ones because my brain's going in two different directions at the same time. First one is where do we allocate people's time? So when you are writing a LinkedIn post and when I'm writing a LinkedIn post, let's assume that we're getting roughly the same results. That's not always the case. You need to weigh that in as well. But it takes me four times longer than you. Like you should probably just be Ghost writing my LinkedIn post then instead of me. It just makes a lot more sense to get people into their sweet spots based on where their time is going. We might look at this by department too, or by pod or by team. Hey, this pod, when they service a client takes X amount of time. This pod takes this amount of time. Results are actually better at the one who's taking less time. So what's different? Is it a skill level? Is it, you know, different practices? And now we're starting to dig down into the granularities of the time tracked against tasks to understand where is this? You know, sometimes that's oops. Someone left the timer going for 15 hours. Like we've seen that in a lot of teams that we've audited data on. Really oops or not? Not an oops. Like sometimes that'll pop up. Well, we've got to correct that now to understand like is the data accurate or not? Not accurate. We can do a whole episode on data accuracy, how to make sure that's right and why folks should just hire zenpilot to make sure that that's always, always correct. But no, not actually. But just, just how to do that. So we're looking at like how do we get people into their sweet spot and teams in their sweet spots. And then the other side is what is taking way too long where it's not. We just need to go charge more for this, but we need to get way more efficient at the process. And now we're creating our bucket of what are our highest impact processes to improve and get faster at. Right now our profitability and utilization reporting is the by far and away the best solution on the market. If you are using ClickUp today and your team is tracking time, but you're either paying extra to use Harvest or Everhour or Toggl or any of those tools. And now you're paying double and you've got work into or you've got data in two different systems or you're tracking all your time and ClickUp but you're not able to get a lot of the profitability and utilization reporting that you need. We've got far and away the best solution for it, but it's early on and if anybody. Yeah, go ahead.

Let me just add in if anybody's curious about seeing that. We do have a demo of that on our YouTube and you can check it out on our site as well. Zenpilot.com under currently you'll find it under products under profitability reporting. But it does. Yeah, it's one of the things that I like to talk about the most. Like I make it a point to show it before when we start each webinar just because like it feels like Andrew once called it zenpilot co founder he called it the top of the mountain. Right where you want to go in terms of clarity, in terms of information, in terms of like being able to pin down profitable, unprofitable service lines, clients, departments, whichever. Yeah, I'm glad you brought it up because it looks pretty magical in action.

So I was actually just using this as an example. Now it is actually like that solution and you can get there either way. You can spend like I just talked to somebody last week who's spending 12 hours a week pulling reporting, running it through all these spreadsheets to get to the same endpoint. But they're just eating up a huge amount of time and then it's still not real time. It's like he's running it three times a week right now because it's a super, you know, hundreds and hundreds of people team, but it's still not real time. Like the solution, the product that we've built, the software that we've built is the only real time solution. But right now if you want to buy costs a minimum of $400 a month if you want to commit to annual and there's a setup fee on top of that. And so it is super powerful. It's going to be way cheaper than someone spending, you know, multiple hours a week working on that. But it's still a lot more expensive than what folks expectations are. And because they often don't have the habits to use that data. Well, it's in some cases not like there's not a path to ROI that they can clearly see because it's not Replacing something they're existing, they're doing currently because the solution is, is hard. So that is an area where our process, there's a lot of manual work in that process right now. And that's one of the biggest points of, one of the biggest areas that we're working to address is how can we make this less and less expensive to deliver so that we can decrease the cost, the barrier to entry to get into the tool. Ultimately we'll acquire a lot more of the users in the ecosystem and that'll wind up being a great move for us. But we've got to figure out how to scale this and how to get this at a, at a lower price point for a lot of the earlier stage firms to benefit from it. You know, if you're a 20 person plus firm, this is like a no brainer and it's not that expensive. If you're a five person firm, this is a lot harder to justify as an investment to make today to then get that data and make decisions moving forward. So you're trying to use that time tracking data to make decisions around like hey, what processes or what areas do we need to get substantially more efficient at?

Okay, so one thing I wanted to prod you for still within this topic is so you showed a few examples. I was wondering if you had a couple more of like here's what you might find after analyzing this data. I mean in general terms, you know, this work is costing us too much, it's underpriced. Or you know, we could be driving efficiency here and maybe reduce the price. I understand in general terms, but like, do you have any examples of like stuff that was actually found in your work with agencies?

Yeah. Would you rather go. Because I feel like this is like we should do maybe a whole episode separately on this. Maybe not though. Would you rather get, we're getting farther and farther from an individual PM tracking time, like hey, what does this look like? Would you rather do examples of where that time commonly comes back as wasted at an individual level or higher up at a corporate level?

Oh, let's just go with the first one. Let's go with the first one. That feels good for this episode.

Yep. So almost always when we look at that, 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, like thinking of what to write, asking AI to help them write it, looking for data on stuff, trying to pull reporting and then actually like just monitoring email, just like going in and hitting the refresh. Button or logging back into pulling up Gmail or whatever is almost always a much larger time waster. Well, that and slack. Any communication, any chat tool in the, in the internal team that's almost always above what folks would estimate where they're trying to go. So that's a common one. Unsurprisingly, probably. Social always comes back higher. Like you can do this personally too. Like if you just ask any of your friends how much time they spend on whatever. If they're over the age of 35, ask them how much time they spend on Facebook. If they're in their 20s, ask them how much time they spend on Instagram. And then after they answer that, ask to look at their screen time reporting. And no one's going to give their phone up because it's always higher than, you know, what they, what they are outwardly willing to admit. So social will always come back, almost always come back higher as well. So those are a couple areas that consistently get hit when you look at, hey, where did time go? And then like what actually happened? On these specific projects, there's often a ton of time. This is along the communication side and the reporting side of like status updates trying to find what's next. Like a ton of this inefficiency often ties back to the project management infrastructure that they have is it's super hard to pull reports or service data. So there's a lot of time spent digging through project management tools and just trying to find and understand the data. Along the communication side would also be bugging team members like trying to figure out where stuff stands. So like a ton of that time can go away with better, better infrastructure, but that takes time to build out. So those are a couple of the like unsurprising main areas. Are there any areas that you think would be either higher or lower than like anything that you think of that might be a surprise one way or another.

I mean, there's research comes to mind. Like I not always fully aware of like how much time I spent kind of pulling information, but I actually wanted to make a bit of a different comment on what you just said, if I may. It's funny to me. Well, interesting is a better word. Like how much of this ties back to some of the other stuff we talked about, like general productivity, but also like clarity on like work time versus non work time and giving yourself these kind of large solid blocks of work that are not super convenient to fit in your day, you know, it has to be said. And they do require a little bit of a lot old Bit of self discipline to implement. But when you do either sprints or pomodoros, you know, just give yourself clarity. Know that this is the time to hunker down. And you're not going to have for the next 25 minutes, you're not going to have any red on your rescue time or you know, for the next 40 minutes or whatever you decide on then. And this ties back into like batching work. So don't check, you know, a couple emails, check them all in like one session or two sessions a day. Don't write one LinkedIn post, write several if you can, in one, in one session. Get in the groove. Right? A lot of it then kind of eliminates in my mind the problems that you, that you mentioned. But it's all about being like, about intentionally designing your work day and if you don't do that intentionally, it'll design itself for you and you'll follow your kind of baser instincts of okay, I spent 10 minutes on that. I wonder if there's something on Instagram, right. And I been there, done that, I'll admit. So I just wanted to bring that up as. And we have an episode about batching also that we recorded I believe as part of agency breakthrough that might have been.

Yeah, I think you're right.

I'll put it in the show notes. I'll put it in the show notes though because that was a good conversation just popped in my mind as like where my mind goes with relation to that and I mean, perhaps unsurprisingly so it's a conversation about productivity at the end of the day. But there's the amount of time and there's the quality of time is I guess my, my main point here. And if you got good quality time, you can I think, work less hours and have a better result for sure.

And do you think that's a key piece here as you have as you're doing the first couple of weekly reviews together of time even even bringing this up as like, hey, I we are going to do this together. You've got to be super clear that as we look at this, for most folks this like they will feel guilty looking at it the first handful of times that they, that they do it with honest data and that's totally fine. Like the goal here is to help them become a much better operator, more efficient. Like they can probably spend less time, they should be able to spend less time in many cases working or be able to reallocate that time and higher impact stuff. And like ultimately there's a There's a path to making more. So I think you just have to reiterate, this is not, we're not looking at this to go beat you up. Like, this is all about just trying to build a skill set and build a muscle of being, you know, if we look at, well, you're tracking 45 hours a week, or, you know, you think you're working 45 hours a week right now, well, what, what are the outputs of that? What's coming from that? Go ahead and write out like the, you know, the 10 most impactful things that happen over the course of the week. And when nine of those look like, well, I communicated with this person, I communicated with this person, I communicated with this person, then I got this thing back on track. When a lot of that looks like communication, it's like, hey, we're probably missing a whole bunch of stuff here that, like, there should not be this much communication. What we're doing is we're not accurately setting good expectations at the beginning because we're constantly going back and getting more feedback from the client and readjusting, or we're constantly getting feedback from the team and we've got to do something else and then we're not. Besides not setting good expectations, we don't have the right infrastructure to actually manage this efficiently. We don't have processes to follow. We don't have a way to go see what's off track or on track. We don't have good habits to make sure that it's actually accurate if it says it's off track, that it's actually off track, or if it says it's on track, that it's actually on track. So I think that those two pieces of like, hey, all of this could be reasons why you feel threatened or feel like, oh, man, the only reason we're doing this is because you're unhappy with it, is you've got to kind of over communicate like, no, I'm not. I'm trying to do this to help us and to help you all together. And this is not like the, the last thing that you're going to do before you get let go from the job.

Okay, well, wait to state it like that. Great. So, last thing I wanted to add to this from my end, what comes to mind, you like to talk about the gap and the gain. And I feel like this part is where the gain is needed the most. Talking about time tracking instantly puts people in the gap and what's missing and the hours I missed, et cetera. And I think doing an exercise like this. And I just wanted to summarize the steps for listeners convenience in just a second here. Going through these steps also should give you an idea of okay, I worked this amount of hours, I accomplished all of that in that time. Lots of people wish they could do as much. Whatever it is you're best at, is it writing, programming, design. I kind of pride myself on my ability to run events like this amount of hours. And wow, I managed to get an event. 250 people signed up, 100 people showed up. I'm thinking this one in particular was the AI and Agency Ops Roundtable. Check it out on our YouTube. The recording is available. I would hope that when it's a relationship of trust and when there's a particular positive attitude about it, that it would put you in the gain and actually give you a better idea or a better feeling at some point about your work output. That was my last thing to add. And how about to wrap kind of a bow on top of this one and let the listeners go here as they head to the next one, next pod episode on their list, whatever that may be. I don't know, horror series, some criminal stuff, hardcore history maybe. I heard that recommended a lot. I don't know what's next, but before we go there, how about quick summary of like the four steps. I think it was four steps that you mentioned to go through here and kind of to finally answer the question that you got from your, from your work connection there.

Yep. So first thing is bring up the elephant in the room and say, hey, I want to like help you in this area. Not because I'm, you know, particularly worried or stressed out about this. It's like you are doing good in this specific situation. Like your output is good. But I want to walk through this exercise. I plan on doing this with the, you know, the rest of the team, whoever else is reporting to me. And so here's my, here's what I'd like. I'd like how many hours roughly you think you've worked, give me your estimates. And then here's what we're going to do moving forward is we're going to track your time. Your goal now for next week is to track all your time. Also install something like rescue time. That's a conversation. You get to decide whether you want to push on that or not. Some people will be super open to it, other people will be super against it. And you have to decide how hard you want to push on that. And then we are going to have this 20 to 30 minute block for the next four weeks on our calendar each week, looking at where your time is actually going. And all that we're trying to do is I'm going to be more active in coaching you initially and then as we get farther along, you're going to be self recognizing what should shift, suggesting those as the changes. We've got a chance to refine each other and go from there. That's the kind of high level, like, you know, expectation setting. Next steps are actually executing on that. And the last piece or tied into this is how are we looking at this at a business level? So a separate set of reporting that you're not doing with this one individual person on a monthly or quarterly basis and then communicating back the changes that you're making. You've made some changes on the front end pre sale. What, what are we doing from a pricing and packaging perspective? We've made some changes from a staffing perspective. This person should be working more in their suites about here. This person should be working more in their sweet spot here and you make some changes from a process perspective. This is what needs to get identified and optimized. This is what has been identified as needs to be optimized first. And that's our next project to work on.

Yeah, and that's great that you mentioned that. That was important for me to also hear that, you know, there's this element of like appreciation in there at the, at that last stage of. Thank you, thank you for having that conversation, for tracking that time, for being diligent about it, kind of going through the emotional ups and downs of doing that work. Here's what the company is getting out of it. Thanks to your contribution. Love it, Love it. Awesome. Okay, so I feel like that ties a bow on this one. And yeah, definitely for more insights like this, more conversations between Kuba and Gray here, do follow agency journey, follow ZenPilot on YouTube. We've got a ton of content, not just conversations like this, but if you want to get better at tracking your time at workload management, we've got ClickUp tutorials on our YouTube that you can and you can meet Jeff, our productivity professor. He will teach you a ton about all of that stuff from the kind of tactical tooling level. So don't forget to follow us like us, comment, send us nice messages on LinkedIn or give us feedback. We appreciate it all. And that would be it for me for this episode. Final thoughts, Gray, as we close it out.

No, that was great. I'm out of time anyway. So thanks everyone for tuning in and.

We'Ll see you next time. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you so much. And we'll see you in the next one. Bye. Bye.