We don’t do timesheets.
The 4-word phrase that any new hire in the creative industry longs to hear. The 4-word phrase that virtually guarantees they’ll want to work for you over someone else. There’s nothing worse than getting to the end of a day, week (did someone say month?) and before switching off for the day, having that sudden realisation… sh!t, I haven’t done my timesheets.
Creatives and time
The story of the creative industry’s relationship with time is almost as old as time itself. As Adam Morgan states in his Medium article, “Creative people want to work where the work is all that matters. They obsess about output. To them, your obsession with measuring input is a bummer.” The ‘Creative’ got into this industry to solve problems, and create beautiful, clever, impactful work. They didn’t get into it to look for job numbers, or sit in meetings with clients who aren’t creative but have incredibly strong opinions on what is and isn’t, creative.
Bureaucracy and administration will always be seen as the enemy of creativity – but how do we reconcile these two sides?
Well, for many individuals, their relationship with time will always be love / hate. Some thrive on having a deadline. Some are creatively crippled by being given a specific amount of time to come up with an answer. Some will claim to do their best work after midnight, others will be early birds but be out of gas by lunchtime.
Seen in almost every creative agency
As sure as the Earth will go around the Sun, or that Creative Director will look over your shoulder, we’re guaranteed to see businesses rail against the concept of tracking time with regular reassessment. Complaints from individuals and teams who don’t understand the need and only see the negatives of having to track how long tasks take. Some leaders may remove the practice to prove they trust their team and give them all the freedom they need to do their best work. Others savvily recognise that the data is flawed and inaccurate as Account Managers strive to prove that they can run an on-time and on-budget job.
This Reddit account sums up what we’ve probably all experienced at some point in our careers.
Oh god, timesheets.
Here was the situation at my old agency:
Head office didn't want to "write off" extra time, so we were told to stay within the allotted hours for a project. But...
The account people would promise clients the moon, so they'd brief creative teams with a job that would take all week and then tell them they have something like 8 hours. So...
Creative would use the 8 hours and then say "what do we put for the rest of the time we were doing that project, now that we hit the limit?"
Account Managers would say, put empty space. Then head office would get the timesheets with empty space all over them.
Head office comes back and says "We don't want people sitting around, find a way to fill these timesheets or lay people off!"
So we'd go back to putting in the actual hours worked, and go overbudget on everything, and have to write off the hours. Back to start!
Around and around it would go. I don't know why having to "write off" the hours of salaried employees is a problem, particularly when it's not like we were turning down clients. For those of us in creative, we just got to choose between going over allotted hours or having holes in our timesheets. Besides that, if I was given one hour to write a brochure and actually turned it around in that time, it would be poor-quality work and I'd probably catch flak for it. I think someone needed to talk to the account people about promising the clients an unrealistically low budget, because that was the problem.
(Source: Reddit)
The complexity of time
And this is where we get to the crux of the issue. The creative industry’s relationship with time is complex, tense, polarising, misunderstood, suffocating and mystifying. Despite years of a business model with time at its centre, many business owners are no closer to unlocking its power or potential. Instead it’s become the whipping stick that is reducing profitability and creativity by the hour – and yet, new solutions are given up on, ignored or flawed.
Are we endlessly bound to scratch our heads, shrug, give up and then do it all again? Do we fully understand the problem?
Let’s attempt to travel through unpacking time and the dichotomy of themes that exist pretty much everywhere we look.
More to come.
