Estimates without a timer

Somebody on your team once installed a timer. For a fortnight the numbers were beautiful. Then a timer ran overnight on a task called Lunch, somebody forgot to start one for a whole client call, and by the end of the month the totals were a work of fiction that everybody had stopped looking at. The timer is still there. Nobody has pressed it since March.

That is the normal life of a stopwatch in a small studio, and it is why sjTasks does not have one. What it has instead is a box where you type a number of hours.

Type it, after the fact

Logging time in sjTasks is four things: how many hours, on which day, an optional note, and — for an admin logging on somebody's behalf — whose work it was. The date defaults to today, because writing yesterday's hours down this morning is how people actually work.

You can type 1.5, 2h 30m, 2:30, 90m. It shows back tidily as 2.5h or 2h 5m. There is no rounding into fifteen-minute blocks; if you say seven minutes, it keeps seven minutes.

The honest objection is that hand-typed hours are approximate. They are. So are timer hours that ran through lunch. The difference is that a person typing 3h at the end of a morning is giving you a real judgement — "that took me about three hours" — and a judgement is what an estimate is being compared against anyway. A number nobody trusts is worse than a rough number everybody believes.

The estimate is the interesting half

Time logged on its own tells you what happened. It gets useful the moment there is an estimate beside it. An estimate is your guess, up front, in the same units: ~3h typed into the quick-add box, or a number on the task — one of the few things a task carries at all.

Then the Time panel on each task does the arithmetic for you: the estimate, the logged total, and the difference — 2h over (50%) in amber, or 1h under in green. When there is no estimate it says so, rather than pretending zero is a comparison.

A parent task shows its own estimate and the sum of its subtasks' estimates separately, and never quietly adds them together. If the parent said 4h and the three subtasks say 6h between them, you see both numbers, because that gap is usually the story.

What "over estimate" actually tells you

Here is the part most studios miss. Being over estimate on a task is rarely news about the person who did the work. It is news about the price.

Say the Acme homepage copy was estimated at 3h and Sandy logged 5h. You can read that as Sandy being slow. Or you can read it the way it usually is: you quoted Acme for three hours of copy, and copy for Acme takes five, because Acme sends notes in three rounds and has a legal team. The estimate was not wrong about Sandy. It was wrong about Acme.

Do that across a project and a pattern shows up. Every design task for Acme runs 40% over. Every design task for Bramble runs under. You are underpricing Acme and you have been doing it for a year, quietly, one task at a time. No timer would have told you that. Two honest numbers side by side on each task do.

That is the question estimates are for. Not "who is slow" but "what does this kind of work for this kind of client actually cost us", so the next quote is right.

Where it sits today, honestly

Estimate against logged time lives on each task. There is no list yet that runs the comparison across a whole project in one screen — that is on the way, and the features page says so by name rather than hinting at it. Today you open the task, read the panel, and the pattern builds in your head over a few weeks. That is slower than a report, and it is still faster than the arithmetic you were doing in a spreadsheet.

If you do not want any of this

Then switch it off. Time tracking can be off for a whole team or for one project, and off means invisible: the estimate field, the log panel and the totals are simply not there. Nobody is nagged to fill in a number they were never going to fill in. Today that is something you ask us to set rather than a switch on a settings page, and nothing is lost by turning it off and back on — the entries wait for you.

The question this answers

Estimates and hours only mean something once work is actually finishing, so the list to read is what landed recently. Open a few of those tasks and look at the Time panel.

Show me what was finished in the last 30 days — then, for one client, pick their project from the Project menu and see whether the amber numbers cluster.