At LunarLincoln, time tracking isn’t really about the time itself…it’s about estimation and estimation is about truth. Here is a not-so-secret, secret for you:

TIME TRACKING IS TRUTH.

When starting a project we write userstories that are then turned into tickets. If we wanted to stop there we’d probably fire up Trello – put in the tickets and call it a day. (It would be really great to stop paying JIRA the big bucks and just use Trello) So why do we use JIRA instead? Because of the next step. THE MOST IMPORTANT STEP.

Estimation.

Estimation is how we know how long a project will take. It’s how we know how much a project will cost. It’s how we know how to prioritize and schedule some features (tickets) over others. We’ve had past clients use Trello and honestly I don’t know how anyone knows anything on those projects other than where individual tickets are at. They don’t know the “when” of a project or more importantly the “how much” answers. (Which generally, are all that a client or project manager cares about). It’s madness I tell you.

So how do we estimate our tickets in JIRA? With time (of course). ENTER HOURGLASS.

We need to know exactly how much time we spent on each and every ticket. We need to know how true those initial estimates were. Is the project going to cost more? Are we going to hit our delivery date? All of these answers can be determined through estimates and checking the veracity of that predicted time through time tracking.

At LunarLincoln we don’t need some fancy, complicated time tracker for this process. We just want to know how much time we spent on each ticket. Simple. Which is why we built Hourglass. You open the ticket you’re working on, click start, and before you know it, you’re billing clients, fulfilling you estimates, and speeding yourself to completion one second at a time.

Hourglass integrates directly into JIRA tickets and worklogs so you don’t have to do any more steps. It makes it simple and obvious when you’re logging time and that’s about it. We love it for keeping us honest with our ticket estimates and we think you might just like it too.