Another “picking your brain” post this week.
I find that I am drawn to entity buttons for time tracking for the simple UX of being able to “click to start” from any entity in the workspace.
However, without conditions on automations and buttons, this is not the best way to prevent many, incomplete time entrees.
Are people experimenting with apps for time tracking? How are you caching what time entry is open and preventing incomplete time entries for users.
I spent a lot of time trying to create something similar, and while ultimately we decided to do away with Time Tracking in Fibery (opting to use Zoho Books’ tracking instead), I foresee a near future where we’ll be wanting to bring that back into Fibery.
When we were using it, we did the same approach – heavily utilizing entity buttons to ‘start timer’ and ‘stop timer’.
We had an entity field on our Users of “currently working on” or some such thing, that filled in whatever task they’d most recently clicked “Start Timer” on, as well of course as the StartTime field to do the math from.
Where things fell apart, as they always do, are the ‘human’ elements – forgetting to start a timer, forgetting to end a timer, and so on. We started building out conditions around that to try to catch them, such as ‘if a timer is going on for more than X hours, assume it’s abandoned and stop timer’, and so on. Ultimately, trying to catch all that stuff let do a muddled experience and unexpected results, so we moved to a different system.
It’s something I want to revisit at some point, however. We have a LOT of intergrations between Fibery and Zoho Books as our invoicing software, so it feels like a natural next step if we can sort out the sticky parts.