Time logging

[Fredrik Limsater]

Hello community
We're planning to improve the time logging in ftrack. It's accepted on our Roadmap/backlog (see roadmap item here: https://trello.com/c/vNEdfene) and we're now very keen to hear your input and feedback.  

Looking forward to your feedback.

Cheers,
Fredrik

[tokejepsen]

Being able to change the time log for other people as a supervisor or coordinator would be good.

[Fredrik Limsater]

As a reference, here is the original design/research I did for ftrack v3. Not all ideas/features got implemented.

/F

timelogging-for-v3.pdf

[instinct-vfx]

+1 for a limited (in terms of ACL permission controllable) way to change timelogs

Here are a few from the hip (just saw your concepts, have not yet gone over those!)

• Validate/Sanity check time logs (no more 24+h days)
• Beeing able to lock timelogs after a certain amount of time has passed (e.g. lock editing and adding timelogs older than a set date or older than x days)
• Prevent logging time to arbitrary tasks (only allow adding timelogs for tasks a user is or was assigned to)
• Allow for notifications (with lots of over- or undertime)

 

More to come and good to see that on the roadmap!

[Milan Kolar]

To add to list these are some thing more in a bug than a feature category.

• Adding time logs by just typing a duration in the main field and pressing save, should use current time as end time, rather than start. 
• Editing time logs should allow changing the stop time as well as start time, currently the only way to change timelog is changing duration.

Something to deal with the occasional super long day (as instinct-vfx mentioned) would be great. Maybe a notification that pops up every hour after certain time that prompts user to confirm he's still working, if he doesn't it turns off the logger, because he's most likely gone home. 

 

Ideally though this could all be integrated with connect. Auto start timers on launching app for task, and stopping when artist closes it.

[instinct-vfx]

I agree with connect integration though i am unsure if this is maybe too shop-dependent to be generally implemented. e.g. i would need this rather configurable and user selectable at different leves (e.g. opening max in 3 different shot contexts does not necessarily mean i need to track to the last one only. Might be opened for reference etc.)

[instinct-vfx]

Oh, and stopping should also be done when locking the machine. The way our old local agent handled idle time (that is both "machine got locked" and "machine is idle") was that after a certain grace period (i think 10min back then) logging back in would trigger a dialog asking you what you want to do with the time since idle. Was it really on the task that was running or was it time off (forgot to stop when going for lunch) or on a different task (forgot to stop/switch) when going into a meeting).

That seemed to work pretty well.

Cheers,
Thorsten

[Milan Kolar]

9 minutes ago, instinct-vfx said:

I agree with connect integration though i am unsure if this is maybe too shop-dependent to be generally implemented. e.g. i would need this rather configurable and user selectable at different leves (e.g. opening max in 3 different shot contexts does not necessarily mean i need to track to the last one only. Might be opened for reference etc.)

Very true actually. 

[pierre]

The ability to log time on tasks with any status would help, I believe tasks that are in "blocked" or "finished" state (don't remember which one) won't appear in the timesheet view

[instinct-vfx]

11 minutes ago, pierre said:

The ability to log time on tasks with any status would help, I believe tasks that are in "blocked" or "finished" state (don't remember which one) won't appear in the timesheet view

Hm. I actually wish for both. You can still track and they do show up. I would like to be able to STOP people from logging time on tasks they are not assigned to nor is the task still beeing worked on.

(If you favourite tasks, then they stay there forever).

Cheers,

Thorsten

[pierre]

isn't "restrict timelogging" made for that purpose  ?

[davecampbell]

+1 for supervisors being able to add / edit time logs for artists.

We have a remote team that are unable to connect to our local ftrack instance and this leaves a black hole in our tracking (security policies on both our side and the remote site prevent FTrack App access via phone) so having the ability to import an Excel or edit/add logged time for other users (access via the API?) would be a big help! 

cheers!

dc

[Sven]

Another +1 for the ability to add / edit time logs of artists by supervisors / managers. Is there an ETA on when the time logger will be updated?

[Remus Avram]

+1

[Nebukadhezer]

I shamelessly would like to see features of my timelogger in ftrack.

- multi selection of tasks and configurable default values
- we have the choice to either say "I worked on these 3 tasks for 9 hours" and each task will get 3 hours or one can just pick values for each one (but if more than one is selected they all get the same value)
- those can be easily edited afterwards
- next thing is to parse the user logs per day and then the timelogger will make a suggestion for the day which is editable before submission  

-

[Mattias Lagergren]

14 minutes ago, Nebukadhezer said:

I shamelessly would like to see features of my timelogger in ftrack.

Nice! So the image - does that show your current time-logger that integrates with ftrack? And if I understand you correct you would like the same features in the ftrack web UI?

[Nebukadhezer]

Yes, this is our ftrack timeLogger at the moment and yes I think the same functionality would be benificial. 
Some artists have tasks that can be done sub 30 mins, still we want them to be able to log time in a not super exact manner but easiliy.
With the current web ui the main block is the task selection in the time sheet  overview, sure if an artist starts/stops his timers correctly, but I am constantly failing in doing so 

From my experience timelogging is never easy and the biggest problem is imho that the way people need to do it is too complicated.
With Thorstens suggestions above asking users what they did and so on is also a bit too "big brother" like for me personally... (sry Thorsten)
Since we have the timeLogger app artists can do there timeloggs in the evening in a breeze, once we get the "show me all tasks I have worked on today" function (including a timing suggestion) in there I guess it will be even faster...

cheers
Johannes

[Mattias Lagergren]

Thanks for elaborating - I will add your posts for consideration if/when we move forward with the time logging improvements. 

[bjoern]

On 5/31/2016 at 3:35 PM, instinct-vfx said:

Oh, and stopping should also be done when locking the machine. The way our old local agent handled idle time (that is both "machine got locked" and "machine is idle") was that after a certain grace period (i think 10min back then) logging back in would trigger a dialog asking you what you want to do with the time since idle. Was it really on the task that was running or was it time off (forgot to stop when going for lunch) or on a different task (forgot to stop/switch) when going into a meeting).

That seemed to work pretty well.

Cheers,
Thorsten

I like to add to this. I used recently shotgun + Toggle. And I would love to see a idle detection. I forgot to stop my timer before probably 4 out of 10 times. Now its worse

[ChrisLynch]

I'd really like to have a setting for time logging so it auto starts when status is set to "In Progress" and then stops when status set to "approved". This would not be good for calculated work hours but would give good data on life cycle length of a task.

I suspect others have a method for this already...

[Mattias Lagergren]

Hi Chris, welcome to the forums.

Would this be a time logging entry or perhaps better tracked as a custom attribute on the entity? Time logging is primarily meant to track how much time a user has been actively working on a task.

[ChrisLynch]

Yes I think you are right.

If the user must set the timelogging to be turned on and off this would lead to much erroneous data as the users will often not start or stop the time log as they will forget (Even with reminders set!).

If the time logging had an option to start when set to "In progress' and then stop when set to "pending review" this would be very helpful. I have not fully investigated event listeners for this but I presume it can be done along side a custom attribute for entities.

[Lucas Correia]

Hi Chris,

It should be possible to use an event listener to automate starting a timer for a user when a task's status is set in progress. The reason that we don't do this automatically is that there can be several situations where you do not want the timer started automatically, and it is hard to know when this is. 

An event listener is a small python script that can be used to subscribe to changes in ftrack and perform custom logic such as updating a status, starting a external process or triggering a user interface. Here are some useful resources for setting up an event listener:

* Developer hub with introduction to the API
* How to subscribe with the API
* Information about the update event
* Example event listeners

If you are not interested in logging time, but rather want to see how long a particular task has been in a certain state you can look at querying `Event` objects using the API. There is a snippet with some examples here. You probably want to query for action=change.status.task and parent_id=the task's id.

Regards,
Lucas

[ChrisLynch]

Many thanks Lucas, we are just starting Ftrack development for the studio and this is exactly what we are investigating right now.

 

Chris

[kristin]

Currently the timesheet/time logger views allow you to select a Milestone in the Tasks drop-down if you are assigned to it. Given Milestones don't have "Log time" or "Show logged time" in their More menu, it seems as though this is a bug. If it's not, it would be useful to be able to designate what entities a user may log time to -- Task, Milestone, Shot, etc -- to have more control of timelogs.