I have complained about timesheets before, but this critique owes a clear debt to my friend Luise Freese. Her article Unmeasured: Part 1 – We are measuring the wrong things includes a section titled, very appropriately, “Timesheets are a farce.” She challenges the idea that recording time tells us what knowledge work is worth. I agree, with a practical distinction: if a time-and-materials contract requires timesheets to generate an invoice, fine. Capture what is necessary for billing without pretending the result measures productivity.
A timesheet can record how long someone spent reviewing a design, but it cannot tell you whether that review prevented three weeks of unnecessary development. Mentoring a colleague, helping sales answer a difficult technical question, or realizing over coffee that an architecture needs to change can all create value out of proportion to the time recorded. Thinking does not fit neatly into fifteen-minute increments.
Then there is the administrative stupidity that often comes with it. Employees have to classify a contribution as pre-sales, internal work, marketing, training, or bench, even when it affects three projects at once. I made a related point in Holy moly! I am a Microsoft MVP… and this is what it means: sitting quietly and filling out timesheets can keep broken processes alive for far too long. Documenting every minute does not make the work any clearer. Use timesheets to support billing, and judge the work by what it achieves.
This post is part of my 25 lessons from 25 years in consulting series, exploring what it takes to build a consulting firm that delivers for clients and supports the people doing the work.
From leadership and employee experience to sales and delivery, the series comes back to one idea: a consulting company should be its own best client.
Have a lesson of your own? Share what has worked, what hasn’t, or what you wish more consulting firms understood in the comments.