Task Decomposition

It is well known that breaking down your project to smaller task items leads to more accurate estimates and better project management. With estimates, it is hard to understand all the work involved when your tasks are large leading to overly optimistic estimates (and late projects). Small tasks are easier to fully understand and consequently more accurate estimates.


When managing projects, a large task can be out of control long before you know it - too late to save your project and reputation. Problems with a large task will not be a concern until it goes over budget - possibly weeks or months after task initiation. Problems with a small task will show up much sooner and provide time to react.

This is why project management software provides a detailed work breakdown structure. It is difficult, if not impossible to effectively manage a project without it. But because most time tracking software is designed for accounting and billing - they do not track at a detailed level and thus increase the project overhead to monitor project status.

One of the features of Timeless Time & Expense that many customers overlook is the ability to customize the work item hierarchy to suit their needs. Extending the work item hierarchy with your custom levels provides the breakdown to accurately track and estimate work tailored to your environment.

This offers a perfect balance between the limited client-project-task hierarchy of most time tracking software and the unlimited un-named hierarchy of project management software. The detail level provides tracking for project management and the ability to summarize information provides the high level data for accounting and billing.

"More than a spreadsheet"

I was reading a user review for Timeless Time & Expense on of the major software download sites the other day. It was a short review, not much more than a single line that said "more than just a spreadsheet". It reminded me of the early days of Timeless Time & Expense.

Time tracking at its simplest is a piece of notebook paper using a line for each time entry. Like most time tracking systems this usually degraded to a once a week memory exercise. The next step for most was the use of spreadsheet software. This wasn't much better. Each project entry required a fair amount of typing and the memory exercise remained. With cut and paste it was faster to fill out the timesheet at the expense of accuracy.

Since many software developers we required to track their time it wasn't long before many tried to solve the problem. They typically created a 'better' spreadsheet. Dropdown lists were added to select clients and projects. This reduced the errors by limiting the selections to valid values. It was a litte faster and easier so more likely that time would be entered before the end of the week avoiding the same old memory excercise. But it was still just an automated piece of paper. The more detail you needed, the more time it took to select the correct information. This means it is only efficient for tracking time for billing - not for project management. Effective project management requires more detailed time tracking.

This is where Timeless Time & Expense was born. Detailed time tracking for project management requires a different paradigm - one taken from project management. To effectively manage a project, tasks must be broken down to a level of detail which allows the tasks to be easily estimated and tracked. This naturally results in a tree hierarchy with many levels of parent-child relationships. This is the paradigm Timeless Time & Expense uses. A paradigm that is as easy to use with two levels as it is with twenty (more on that in a future post).

This ease of use for our customers come at a price for the developers. In the limited, spreadsheet approach reporting is simple database queries. With a dynamic project hierarchy, it is much more complicated. Luckily, we have developers who are up to the challenge and are currently working to expand and simplify reporting for Timeless Time & Expense 3.0.