The week being approved
What a recorded week is made of, and why a flat one is a warning rather than a result.
What a Week of Recorded Time Is Made Of
A submitted week looks like a grid of numbers. The fields that decide whether it survives a dispute are the ones the person filling it in never sees.
The Flat Week
Five identical days is the most common pattern in any timesheet system and the least likely to be true. What it indicates and what to do about it.
Reconstructing Friday
Most timesheets are written from memory at the end of the week. What memory is good at, what it is not, and how to make the reconstruction less wrong.
Rounding, and Where the Minutes Go
Every timesheet system rounds. The increment, the direction and the level at which it is applied decide who gains, and the decision is usually made by default.
The Description Field
The free-text line next to each entry is optional, mostly empty, and the single thing that decides whether an hour can be billed, claimed or defended.
The Hours That Never Reach the Sheet
Every timesheet is an upper bound that behaves like a measurement. What routinely goes unrecorded, why, and what the omission does to decisions.
The Code List Nobody Maintains
Allocation codes accumulate, decay and get reused. The state of the list determines the quality of every allocation decision made against it.