Why & What is Time Logging
Note: The video covers material not in the guide below — please watch in full.
Action Step
Complete this before moving on.
After watching this video, start thinking about how your day breaks down across customer work, internal work, and things that don't need to be logged. As you go through your first engagements, aim to log time at least twice a day — once midday and once at end of day — so nothing slips through.
Why We Log Time
Time is the economic unit at LeanScale. Engagements are sized based on a number of hours, and that feeds into the overall capacity of the engagement team. When a customer signs an agreement, they're getting a commitment from LeanScale — a set number of hours to move big-rock projects across the finish line and support systems administration within the embedded model.
Logging time is how we deliver on that commitment. It ensures we're fulfilling the capacity we promised at the time of signing.
Understanding Where Time Goes
The second reason we log time is to understand where we're actually spending it. This applies at every level — within an engagement, across engagements, and across your entire architect book of business.
Are we spending too much time in meetings with a customer? Is a specific task taking longer than expected? Are we able to execute, or is something blocking us? These questions only get answered when time is tracked accurately.
Accuracy matters, but this isn't about big brother. LeanScale leadership isn't triple-clicking into every time entry. The goal is driving insights into how engagements are being conducted — on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis.
What to Log: Billable Time
Billable time is the largest bucket. This is anything directly related to customer work. It includes:
- Meetings — daily standups, weekly sprint meetings, ad hoc meetings with clients, and internal meetings about client projects
- Project management — time spent in Teamwork organizing projects, communicating with customers, moving things along
- Task execution — reporting tasks, Loom recordings, documentation, anything assigned to you
- End-of-week recaps — the Friday recaps sent out to customers, logged per customer
- Customer communications — Slack messages, emails, any written comms with customers, captured in roughly five-minute increments
The catch-all: any time you're spending that is customer-related should be billed to that customer. One of LeanScale's values is integrity — use your best discretion. As you work through engagements, you'll develop a feel for what should and shouldn't be billed.
There are also cases where you can log time under a customer but mark it as non-billable, meaning it won't count against their hourly allotment. The how-to session covers this in detail.
What to Log: Internal Time
Internal time covers everything that isn't customer-facing. One-on-ones with your manager, weekly go-to-market architect meetings, monthly company meetings, catch-ups with peers, and syncs with leadership outside your direct reporting line.
Internal initiatives also fall here. If you're working on something to improve LeanScale — a process improvement, an internal project — that gets logged under the internal project in Teamwork.
What You Don't Need to Log
Not everything needs to be tracked. Lunch breaks, stepping away from your computer, personal appointments — these go in the unnecessary column. LeanScale isn't looking to account for every single minute of your day.
The goal is to capture time that matters: customer work, internal work, and initiatives. Log as much as makes sense so we have a clear picture of how time is allocated across engagements and internally.
Log Twice a Day
One practical recommendation: log your time at least twice a day — midday and end of day. With the pace of play at LeanScale across multiple engagements, waiting until the end of the day means you'll forget what happened in the morning. Splitting it into two sessions keeps your entries accurate.
All time logging happens in Teamwork. As you go through LeanScale Academy, you'll get practice logging time, and it will start to feel second nature.
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