Data Presentation

What-Am-I-Doing started off a a way of accurately billing my customers - giving me a way that I know what to bill, and they are happy to pay becaus the work has been done and the value added. I do occasionally have bad days, and reduce the invoice because what I've achieved has not reflected the time spent, but generally what's fair is fair. It is, however, important to recard the time accurately, and then to make the decision about discounting once. Otherwise you end up discounting when you record the time and then discouting again when you do the invoice.

Anyway, that's not what this article is supposed to be about. I wanted to talk about the charts that I have added to What-Am-I-Doing.  I've added two pie charts and two bar charts. One pie chart shows the project split across a day, week or month, and the other shows the type or project.

This is the chart for last month. It has started being addictive - I'm lucky that I work for myself, and generally my target is to spend 50% of my time on customer paid work, not too much on admin and the remainder on learning, trying things, self development and internal projects. This graph enable me to manage this really effectively. I can view it on a day by day basis and maintain that balance, or if I'm, really busy then towards the end of the month I can see where I am and allow myself some exploration time - guilt free!

The bar / column charts allow me to look at the product life cycle for projects. The project below was a disaster (from my point of view - the customer was happy!)

What happend was that the project took the right amount of time between March July, then the customer, who had fooled us into believing that she had certain competencies and that she was looking at what we were doing all along (through phone calls, emails and meetings) then changed, and we had to spend August and September retraining.