I am salary so it didn't really matter but I reminded myself to only work on that project at work. I did "pick out" a general design template that wasn't too fancy, not too boring, but just needed it to look professional enough as a functional tool.

Everyone had their say in design, colors, etc. They had a say in functionality and things like that. The concept was simple: keep track of time. Then it was my team who suggested: "since we all work on the same projects sometimes, can all of our time count towards the same project and can we see how much time everyone spent on it individually and still know the total time it took?" Definitely.

It's probably got some bugs and could stand to use an update, but I've got too much going on right now. They had a few feature requests themselves, but seeing as we got more back into streamlining jobs at work and less custom jobs, they stopped using it, and I didn't do anything more with it. But as a freelancer and a contractor for different companies and working on some projects with multiple people around the world, allowing them to add to my time entries too allows me to see the workload, what is being done, how much time it takes, etc.

I started it because my boss had been seeking to understand what everyone did besides their main skillset. So she assigned everyone a personal project based on what we told and showed her we could do. She did this so that she could understand how she might use a specific team member for a specific task that was "outside their job description yet part of it." (You all know how that goes.)

While my day job is mostly web design, my night job is web development and technical writing. We streamline our work which takes generally 1-2 hours processing time with a 4 hour total turnaround time, but for some jobs, we were getting "custom requests" or "custom work" from clients, which means they'd want more from the product.

With some CSS or Javascript, nearly everything is possible, but it does take time to do, but most clients might see it as: "Thanks for adding the tab toggle that allows us to scroll through social media without ever going below the fold." That isn't something that just happens in seconds nor is it "point and click". There is actual design and development that need to happen and things that need to connect and tests that need to be done.

Client reality vs. client expectation in terms of what they pay vs. the amount of work they think we did is far from reality, and you may have spent 5 hours on it, but they think you may have spent 5 minutes doing it which is common.

Unfortunately, from the time it was taking to do some research and write the code, get it to work and look good, and actually have a client say, "That's exactly what I wanted and here's the money for the job. I'm definitely happy I helped make your life easier and we were exactly on the same page the first time."

crickets

Anyone? Bueller? Yeah.. the first time a client sees a project, it is expected they won't like it or want to make changes, and so, when it comes to custom work, it's very hard to "get it right" or adjust for all screen sizes or whatever the case may be. When do the requests stop? We pride ourselves on not hardly ever saying, "We can't" or "No". It happens, but we try not to. More importantly, if the requests continue, can we charge for those additional hours outside of the norm?

Hours upon hours and time and money and "doing things just so the client can see how it looks" costs businesses MILLIONS to BILLIONS of dollars every year in lost time or productivity. So our clients pay for an allotment of 5 hours of web design time. After that... well, they can opt to pay more. However, we had gotten so used to streamlining everything and had been doing it for years that when requests were coming in, we were just doing them, and not billing any of those clients for those hours.

And the thing is... you can ask any designer or employee of yours how long something took, and they will definitely give you a rough idea. How long does it take you to do that thing? 15 minutes. 30 minutes. 1 hour. And sure, we can charge the clients that, but we weren't all sure on the amount of time it was taking us, especially if multiple people are working on the same project.

There are tools that do exist to record your time and things like that, but we just weren't using one, and my company was already losing money, so they weren't going to exactly go out and buy any new software, so I volunteered my services. I've been at my job for almost a decade now so brownie points and the like do not actually work for me anymore, I help when I can. So instead, it is more like I have to show that I have relevant skills that they do not need to replace me with anyone else, and that I can do anything they throw my way.