I have worked at my current job for 9 months and YESTERDAY, (9 months after I started! 270 days!) one of my bosses said “so if you can just print your reports out from trackit for us to add to our time records…” and the world started getting fuzzy and I weakly said “um, trackit? what is trackit?” And she said “it’s the computer program where we record our work time,” and I said “eep” and then I died.
See, we rarely get fees for the work that we do at my job, and as a result we do not bill in the same way lawyers at law firms bill their hours- we don’t send out monthly invoices, or participate in little competitions between ourselves to see who can bill the most hours in a month. We just work. When I started, I asked one of my coworkers about keeping time, and she said “we don’t, really- I mean, keep maybe an informal record of the meetings you go to that would be compensable if we ever got fees, but otherwise don’t worry about it.”
Turns out she’s in the group whose time is NEVER compensable, so they don’t keep time at all. I am not in that group. Apparently, I was supposed to be logging my time in a computer program that I did not know existed, (including non-compensable time! just for fun!) to “provide a record” of what I’ve been doing. I’m supposed to do it in 6 minute intervals. It’s supposed to be classified into different categories of work. I now have to go back and try to recreate, in 6-minute blocks and 10 different categories, what I have been doing for the last 9 months. Hold me.
No one in the office has ever mentioned trackit, or told me how I was expected to track my time, or, you know, gave me a login and password for the program or anything and I KNOW, I should take responsibility and keeping time is part of being a lawyer and I should have inquired further and should have been keeping better track of my time anyway for my own purposes and yadda yadda. But come ON. Shouldn’t this have been in the employee handbook somewhere? Shouldn’t I have learned about this sometime before now?
More importantly: how the hell am I supposed to go about reconstructing the roughly 100,800 minutes I have worked at this job into nicely categorized 6-minute chunks?
Oh, man. I would just come clean and explain that you asked about keeping time and were erroneously told you didn’t need to. Moreover (lawyer speak, ha!) someone in IT should’ve provided you with access, which they didn’t. So how could you even know you were supposed to do something when you weren’t informed and no one set you up with the tools to do so?
OH MY GOD. i am dying for you. this is exactly the sort of scenario i ALWAYS FEAR will happen. i’ve had smaller versions of this, but never NINE MONTHS IN, for the love. that is not your fault; that is EXCEPTIONALLY POOR information dissemination on your employer’s part. jeebus.
ps: that was a lot of caps. i’m sorry.
OH MY GOD. This is NOT your fault. Nobody told you about this and that is DEFINITELY something they’re supposed to mention in training. It is not even funny to consider the possibility of chronicling nine months of work time in six-minute increments. I’m with Shauna–you have to tell them and see what they say.
My heart just dropped for you. Seriously. Are you kidding me? Oh my. I wonder if you can real-time blog the comments running through your head as you track that time … in 6-minute increments, of course!
This reminds me of a book I read “Undomestic Goddess.” She was a lawyer of sorts and had to log her time in 6-minute increments.
Anywho* I feel bad that you have to do this for the last 9 months! That’s craziness but I’m sure you can do it! Sending you good vibes
I would do what P&D says. There is NO WAY you can actually recreate all those 6-minute intervals. NO WAY.
This reminds me of when I was in 4th grade, and after a few months the teacher cheesed me out for not working on my phonics folder, which I was supposed to have been working on independently. I’d had chicken pox early on in the year and had never HEARD of the phonics folder. Of course I was MORTIFIED. Now, in my thirties, I’m angry at the teacher, who did not immediately say, “OMG I’M SO SORRY!” but instead made me feel like it was my fault.
Oh, hi, was this post about YOU?
This blows. The way you do this is by using your email to remind yourself of what you did – that, plus the files will help you recreate your time.
Present this to your bosses as “I’ve stumbled across a huge potential for liability here – incoming attorneys are not being fully trained when they start. Why, just yesterday I was informed we’re supposed to use a computer program I was never told about NINE months ago. Let me know if you want help creating a training manual – I’ll be happy to work on that after I finish backtracking my time.”
This happened to me, but luckily it was within three or four months. I guesstimated my time and since then have tried to be better about tracking my time. Looking back, I grossly underestimated the amount of time I spent, even though at the time, I felt that my estimates were really high.
I now have a twitch because of your post.
I. . .I. . .I can’t wrap my mind around it. Are they KIDDING you with that crap? I mean c’mon.
I say sue them for emotional distress. Or something.