Everyone is required to use Cantilever’s Harvest Workspace/Org for time tracking when working on Cantilever work. This document describes how we’ve set things up (and why) and how to use Cantilever’s Harvest for optimal results.

We know that time tracking gets a bad rap—and for good reason. It’s often executed poorly, is frustrating to manage alongside doing real work, and doesn’t typically provide much value to the individual who is responsible for tracking time. Our intent is to implement a better approach at Cantilever so that it can feel more useful, efficient, and even easy.

An effective time-tracking practice creates reliable data on how people are spending time at work. This data is what allows individuals, managers, and leadership to make better decisions on day-to-day things like task/project estimation and staffing/assignments as well as big-picture decisions like how much to charge clients and what services to offer.

At Cantilever, we need time-tracking data so that we can accurately bill clients for hourly-based services, improve our resource planning and staffing, and enable individuals and managers to more easily identify and resolve the potential for burnout.

Yes, we know it’s unrealistic to expect that you’ll never forget to start or stop a timer, but the idea is that live/active time tracking should be the norm whenever reasonable. After doing this for many years, we’ve just seen the huge disparity that often exists between perception and reality when it comes to time estimation, even at the end of the workday.