i dont like the entire HR stuff hehe. but beyond that if you goto a factory/hospital to work with a timeclock if you dont clock in/out you dont get paid .
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I understand both sides of the coin, but agree with Suga that the penalty is too much. As much as we need financial control, I do not think a penalty of 20% is something fair. We should try to see what are the concerns of those not willing to fill the numbers in Clockify, if it is a matter of being lazy, I understand it should be done but if there is a different reason we should try to work it around.
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I was asked by some members to engage and vote here as well. So here’s my take:
I personally have always been using Clockify since I started with Giveth, even before I knew there was a system in place. I believe it’s the best and most honest way to track and compensate part-timers fairly.
For core/full-time members, I don’t think this is a fair system as it might discourage the full-timers to do more or invest more hours as they normally are required to.
In our company, we only require freelancers and part-timers to clock in so they can be paid fairly. And our core members always put in more than they are (officially) required with the full-time hours in order to keep up with targets and company goals. If we ask them to track hours, it may have an adverse effect as they will only stick to the required hours anyway.
6 Likes
I can understand these points but I still don’t think many of you are understand the perspective and importance of using Clockify and WHY is this important.
Firstly to your point @santigs - the DAO Ops crew - namely @freshelle and @Nicbals have been working for months, MONTHS accomodating all the requests and doing extra accounting work to accomodate people who simply refuse to use Clockify - they just simply refuse for certain principles they believe in.
So what’s going to be the final result? What happens when people flat refuse to participate in something that is very important to keep the DAO on track financially and hold contributors accountable? The penalty is a last resort but the context is that DAO Ops has already been at this for months around this issue.
I understand your point regarding core contributors - but since this is an organization with many working groups and each working group is responsible for managing it’s budget it is important to have the categorization of time spent.
The main misunderstanding most people have around how we use Clockify is this:
It’s not so much as important for you to report how much time you spent on certain tasks, but more how much time you spent working for each working group.
We don’t have any idea how much we spend on our products and working groups - not a clue. We have no accountability on how much time people spend working for a WG and if it justifies the perceived results from the perspective of the WG lead.
This makes it really hard for us to do any sort of financial budgeting and also very hard for WG leads to make decisions on how to lead their working groups.
In a traditional organization each employee would only work for a single department - each department could then easily know its costs. However this is not the case since many contributors spend their time in several working groups.
I know for most contributors this is just a drag - you get no benefit out of having to do Clockify. But for the organization’s accounting, transparency and financial planning I don’t see any other way than using Clockify to get us on track.
5 Likes
I absolutely understand measuring expenses is crucial for any project to keep under budget and know about the treasury flows to be able to react and I have no problem using Clockify or any other tool for that purpose. My take is we should understand why there are people who do not feel comfortable with it and try to put a solution in place instead of punishing them.
3 Likes
So far 10 votes against this but so far only 1-2 people have commented why they are against this.
If you have a disagreement this is the place for discussion!
I don’t enjoy logging things but I do it because I know there are times in an organizations development where we need to gather useful data on how we spent our time, skills and money in order to make better decisions as an organization on how we will use such resources in the future.
Deciding how to track something is a challenge but I just, pick something in what I believe to be the right group and, perhaps on analysis the information I entered will be wrong, but my doing it wrong actually helps us get it right later or simplify it further.
If I get hung up on whether I’m doing enough or too much, tracking it right, took too long or forgot to track some things here or there, I let that $h!t go… because the health and success of Giveth is more important than my comfort around providing the information. When we review it, if something pops up, GREAT! Let’s give constructive feedback and make changes and keep on building the future of Giving.
In the reality of my own roles and responsibilities, it is really helpful for ME to see how much time certain tasks actually take - I think I can “just do it” … then I look at the Clockify and realize, it took several hours that seemed to flash by in a few minutes.
For others, the reality might simply be “I DEV for X Hours This Month”. Period. Whomever you commit to getting the job done for, either says yes you did or oh no you dint, and pays you accordingly.
THAT SAID.
Docking GIVtoken vesting feels horrible. That’s just weird. It’s going back on your word, we did not put such conditions on GIVtoken vesting before, it’s a clunky hack and my gut just says YUCK. I would much prefer to see a few options of solving this discussed more transparently in this advice process… establishing penalty conditions as proposed in this way comes off authoritarian and dehumanizing in a way.
SO WHAT, THEN?
Say, the number of hours you want to be paid for must be entered into system X (Clockify now) in order to get paid because that’s what we use to calculate and distribute payroll… that’s a now forward kind of governance decision that, when we understand how much of Freshelle’s time is being expended, makes good sense for the organization as a whole to help stop that from happening.
You put your hours in for the month by date X, your accountable approver reviews by date Y, and Accounting pays out on date Z. For some it should be able to be that easy, I think?
Clockify categorization purpose is simply for payroll, budgeting, forecasting… there is a fine line though into micromanagement that we need to heed for sure, so let’s hear more on where the resistance comes from a bit more before leaping to “Some people aren’t playing the game the way we want them to, so we have to implement a new rule for everyone that means if you don’t follow it you get punished.”
PS. This post was clocked as 15 minutes of Forum Post Advice Process under Contributooors 
4 Likes
Voted against ( although I agree we should do this for part timers and contributors )
So here’s my point of view and why I say this is unfair for core members.
Since the GM agreement We devs are often spinning multiple plates, so it kind of relates the multiple WGs scenario. Every Monday, we break down how we’re splitting our time across projects - like 60% on Giveth, 20% on Dappnode, and the leftover on Regenscore. We let our PM know it and do our best to stick with it and get our deliverables out by week’s end. It’s dynamic and relies on our ability to deliver on time and eyeball our efforts. Time estimation in software development most of the times become astrology you know… so it’s better to do it in hot with short time frames, some call it agile.
So, Isn’t it a bit of a stretch to pin down exactly how many hours and minutes we spend on a task or in a meeting? Our job isn’t a strict 9-5 thing. Some days, my brain’s on fire and I’m killing it with thousands of lines of code. Other times, I’m dying with a problem and zero lines. Weekends might also be the time, or I might not feel the work vibe at all. It’s all over the place. But still pushing to deliver on time.
And that’s why I scratch my head when we wanna say things like, “I spent 28 hours on Y project doing Y tasks.” Is that really more helpful or accurate than saying, “About half my time’s been on X project?” and “I’ll be free next week for X or Y” I’m not convinced. If I’m stuck with a project till December, you’ll know it. If I’m freeing up next month, you’ll know that too. Yes, managing resources is tricky and needs numbers, but are these hour-counts genuinely reflecting our work and creative process? also for a fixed rate on us core members, even if we worked 60 hours a week or 35 hours a week realistically we’re still getting payed what we “signed” on our agreements, no extra times, no micro-management, responsibility and deliverables. I’m a bit skeptical. It’s quite a different thing for part timers or collaborators.
Here’s a thought so I don’t come all whiny: What if we just stick to sharing our availability instead of clocking hours? Let’s keep it flexible and let the WG leaders check if our deliverables and time estimates are in the same frequency each month or whatever timeframe we’re looking at. It’s a bit gentler on our mental peace, especially for those of us feeling the stress when work doesn’t fit neatly into hourly boxes. Maybe we can try this out as a small experiment in one of our projects and see how it goes? It might not be a “one size fits all” solution, but it could offer a bit more breathing room and adaptability in our schedules. And hey, if it doesn’t work, we iterate, adapt, and try something new. We’re all about innovation and adaptation, and perhaps our time management strategies deserve a fresh look too. Let’s find a path that respects both our work and our wellbeing.
Would love to know your thoughts
PS: I didn’t mention why the penalty is a bad idea, but yeah… don’t think that’s the way
5 Likes
That’s really great insight into the developer problems. Most of the push back I have heard in other areas has been related to developer concerns but this was very well thought out feedback.
I agree with your point - time estimation is sort of like astrology - I totally get it. But simply not collecting any info on where time was spent after the fact doesn’t help us find the actual cost for a product or a project.
For example:
Say the EF pays us $50k to do Account Abstraction and we say sure. We make the assumption we won’t spend more than that to build it. How would we actually have anyway to know? If there’s no way to find the cost of these things how are we supposed to make good decisions in the future?
Say we get paid $50k and we spend $75k on getting it done - we would probably know to ask for more for future grants of similar size.
I agree it is tedious trying to sort your minutes and hours and blah blah into all these projects and tasks - but I think we can make it simpler.
What about at the end of every sprint (2 weeks) you gave a percentage to how much time you spent in project X Y and Z - you then divided those percentages by the total hours you worked?
Example Hours Logging
finish 2 week sprint - do a little personal retrospective in clockify. You know you spent about ~75 hours working and you estimate your time already spent in each project was:
20% dapp
20% GIVeconomy
20% QF
40% RegenscoreThen multiply each percentage by your total hours worked and just bulk log the hours into clockify, no need for day to day, minute to minute tracking!
This is already a massive improvement, and it could take you 15 minutes every 2 weeks!
Also, getting stuck on a problem and writing zero lines of code still counts as work! 
8 Likes
Thanks for everyone’s feedback. I just want to add that I totally agree with @yass and @mateodaza and others like @Danibelle and @santigs because ultimately full timers should not be tracking hours. I repeat: demoralizing and counterproductive.
And I do not agree with @Giantkin ’s analogy: we are not a factory or hospital. And everyone knows that being forced to clock in and out does not promote an enjoyable work environment. (Ever seen Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times?)
Moreover, in the 21st century, web3 work environment, we pride ourselves on the importance of self-care, community, trust, and all the feel good concepts to do with mindfulness, autonomy, non-hierarchy and whatnot. It is archaic and counter-mission to revert to logging hours as standard business practice, and studies show it produces negative effects on contributors (and if we look at the history of this subject, we will find that significant transformations have taken place in the last century and that indeed highly skilled workers have ceased such an activity for many, many decades now). It is indeed authoritarian.
All that said, for a time it could be useful for budgeting. But this should not be the future of the way it is.
So we have two issues at work here: 1) how we feel about being forced to log hours and the philosophical implications of that, and 2) how logging hours (for a time?) can be helpful for budgeting.
To recap: 1) bad to force workers to log hours based on 150 years’ worth of reasons. 2) can be useful to get accounting organized.
1 Like
I have opinions against this procedure for companies that practicing agile, which are the result of my 10 years of experience in software teams, and many times I have insisted on realizing them in organizations. Because there are a lot of reasons, I will comment them one by one.
1- Impact on management and work execution inside the teams
The purpose of Agile and Scrum frameworks is to create and build self-organizing teams, the working methods of self-organizing teams are defined by themselves, if a force outside the team tries to change the procedures, the framework and how to control it will be destroyed. You may ask why? I will try to specify it in an example:
We have to demo a special feature next week, people have committed to the team and have an estimate for their work, the complications are not clear, it may be fixed in two hours and they rest the rest of the day, and it may take 12 hours a day and they will stay up at night and finish the work. What is important is to deliver quality work and help others. I don’t care if a person do some research for 3 hours and then code, or non-stop code the whole12 hours, people are different. Someone may consult with his colleague for 1 hour, play a little video game, to let his subconscious mind solve the problem and then finish the work in an hour, I prefer to ask how the work is going instead of asking how you spent your day. Actually, I could ask how you spent your day, but I’d put him at the disadvantage of lying to me about his video game hours. This is not necessary at all.
Now, with the work sheet method, instead of trying to be creative, people go to occupy themselves to fill the form and actually report to that entity outside the team rather than to their other teammates. And rest assured, you won’t find anyone who spends eight hours a day on those categories, they practically have to lie to hide their time on social media behind those categories in a way that makes sense.
This is another example:
As a backend developer, might be embarrassed to help the front team (which is blocked by backend for a release) because it effectively prevents me from filling the hours that I could be on my current task assigned to my new project. I’m actually unintentionally will be shown ineffective by helping, because this bug could take days or hours to fix, and I can’t come up with a better worksheet to show.
With this Clockify, we shift individual motivations towards better worksheets, and that’s what I mean by changing impact on management and work execution
Read More Here:
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2- Complex categories, do we want to check the budget on projects or check how they work?
Some studies have shown how different roles in the team spend their days, if you look at the pictures below, you will notice that they don’t seem to work very well. There are many jokes that a developer sometimes spends more time choosing the name of a package than the code of that package.
What is the purpose of time reporting? Is the purpose of work study or is the purpose of tracking budget allocation on projects? What I see from defined categories is to study the type of work, because categories are not feature-based, and due to the changing nature of features, releases, and team campaigns (like OPs or even comms campaigns) they cannot be consistently classified in Clockify. Many activities are spread between these work teams and cannot be divided.
I have my doubts about the effectiveness of these categories for the purposes that @freshelle mentioned.
- Is tracking how each person spends their time in detail and on an hourly basis really useful for workgroup budget planning?
- Isn’t it better for a work group leader to at least keep track of how to allocate time for what he planned and what actually happened?
- Wouldn’t it be better for DAO OPS to get these numbers from the leader of the working groups, or even with a simpler questionnaire asking how time is allocated between different projects?
To better understand this issue, I will try to give an example:
I am a senior front developer, I have been involved in updating some packages for a feature on the DApp for almost a month, QF WG asked the team to make the QF for the OP round next week, due to dependencies, I have to work for at least 24 hours to fix the existing errors, to remove the blockers of QF release. I might make some hacky decisions to make temporary changes to how the DAPP works just for the sake of QF so that the team can reach its short term goal. In addition, many interactions with testers and frontends are required, which may be related to the requirements of other working groups. After spending 24 hours, with the hope that a quality product will be launched, if they ask me which work group you allocated your time to and what you did, I will definitely be stuck with the challenge of how to announce my time between these groups. I can say that it was all for the QF launch, but at the moment I was fixing the Dapp bug because of the packages, and I might have fixed other bugs for the requirements of other teams.
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3- Human resources procedures.
We don’t overpay full-time people in the team if they work more, of course if I, as a product manager, ask team to spend more time or work on their free time or on the weekend, or to fix a bug, I can’t compensate it with payment tools.
The only thing that makes them do this is the feeling that they are full time and responsible for what they do. Naturally, we should not be sensitive to the times when people do not work, because this is a mutual sense of trust between employer and employee. In my opinion, filling the time sheet, unintentionally damage this trust in the long run. I’m sure that DAO OPS has good intentions and that they have no intention of doing this, however I can only imagine how stressed someone would be to fill out a time sheet if they wanted to work a slow, stress-free week.
Some freelancers are used to this, because the nature of their work brings freedom that they can not take responsibility and work only when they want, but we are dealing with the phenomenon of team building, responsibility, leadership and engagement, which in many aspects it affects some human feelings.
6 Likes
I feel like we are mostly talking past each other in this thread.
No one is promoting a culture of clock in clock out, log your hours and thats life. We are all against that culture, this isn’t a fast food restaurant.
I don’t think we need to all use clockify in the same way… but to satisfy several business requirements of Giveth, we need ESTIMATES of hours for each working group and each GM external project.
How you get those estimates, how often you make them, whether you use percentages, or you use clockify and log every second, or you make a spreadsheet weekly, or you do a guestimation at the end of the month, I feel like this is a personal decision.
A lot of people… i’d say over 1/2 are getting some of their hours billed to clients sometimes. To do that billing we need your help! You need to tell us how many hours you spent on it. Clockify is by far the easiest way to coordinate that.
WGs are now asking for budgets, we are trying to transition to the point where these groups to have financial sovereignty. A lot of people are floating between groups and the easiest way to coordinate the billing is to use clockify.
It is a hard task to track your contributions… for full time people especially, if you want to estimate with percentages, thats cool, and it works. For some people that are really well organized they like to track it daily. That works too!
I don’t think its fair to the GM clients or to the WG leads to just flat out refuse to use clockify. We need to do it. We need it to help us wrap our heads around the complex system that is Giveth. We need it so we can hold ourselves accountable for our contributions.
As far as the “Penalty” I am actually for it… but not as a Penalty, as a reward for the people that are making our systems work smoothly. I think Mitch’s framing of it as a penalty is the wrong framing… cause it’s not like Giveth would keep the GIV… the GIV would actually just go to the people who are using clockify, so it would be a clockify bonus.
I don’t think it should be retroactively applied to Q2 however. I would vote it starts now going forward. Retroactively changing the rules doesnt make sense to me.
9 Likes
Heard.
So in this new framing, the context is that Giveth needs better data for budget allocation and forecasting. Our culture favors incentivizing this work, and the recommendation is to divert from an existing GIVtoken pool for that purpose.
The proposal would present a reduction in the standard GIVtoken vesting of 20%, to create a pool that is distributed to those who use a time-tracking tool to help Giveth collect data that makes for better resource management.
I can get behind that, although I’d need to see what 20% looks like in order to vote yes.
1 Like
After considering the feedback shared, I believe rewarding contributors is the way rather than imposing penalties. I think this aligns better with our values and culture, and encouraging participation and transparency.
With the subDAOification shift, one of the major goals is to empower WGs to manage their own budgets, so it’s crucial for WG leads to have a clear understanding on the cost being charged. To compute for this cost, we need some level of organization to gather hours allocation, and ultimately to make informed decisions.
Clockify is the most fit platform that addresses our needs for now.
If we recall, we were previously using Typeform to gather time reports, but it involved too much manual work for us to convert text responses into numbers in spreadsheets, transferring data from one source to another, manual computation, and sending a summarized data to WG leads.
With Clockify, it simplifies the reporting process and it’s all in one place — contributors report hours, automatic computation of costs, WG leads have access on who, how many hours, and how much are being charged to their WGs real-time. Less human error, less manual data processing, better accessibility, and more efficient in financial reporting.
On top of that, as we are working on setting up a paid version of Clockify, we can integrate Time-Off balances directly into the platform, streamlining another aspect of contributor management.
I also want to emphasize that best estimate for your hours allocation is enough. It doesn’t need to be the exact number of hours, what matters is the proportional allocation of your total hours.
10 Likes
Thanks @Griff @mitch @freshelle!
I’ll keep doing my best to track my hours as best as I can. Let’s keep moving forward. Thanks for the hard work on this! 
1 Like
I also want to emphasize that the best estimate for your hours allocation is enough. It doesn’t need to be the exact number of hours, what matters is the proportional allocation of your total hours.
I don’t think people did not contribute to reporting these allocations, the discussion here is mostly around tools rather than the willingness of people to help form better data. We did it before very well with typeform. But struggles only happened after day-to-day and hour-to-hour data, not the allocation.
So I think it’s irrelevant that we even incentivize using Clockify. We can incentivize the cooperation of people to build data. In Development Chapter, we do these resource management timesheets that we can share weekly. Also Im down with any help to facilitate this format.
The only thing that I vote no is reporting hourly because of these side effects I mentioned.
1 Like
I wanted to add my opinion to this ongoing discussion. Tracking and clocking time hourly is not a step backwards, nor is it an archaic practice. It is just a fundamental business hygiene practice - it helps make sure our financial decisions are wise and justifiable.
I understand that to many, it may seem unnecessary and very uncomfortable. But the benefits (to Giveth or any org for that matter) of tracking time hourly outweigh any discomfort it may cause. Besides a lot of benefits mentioned above, which I agree with, I believe tracking time is very important for making financially wise business decisions. Understanding where we as a team invest our time will help Giveth as a whole to evaluate if resources spent on Project X make sense at a particular point in time or not. All of this just helps WG leads make data-driven decisions (and not rely on intuition) to deploy team members to projects where value>cost (time and cost). Sometimes, we’re passionate about some specific projects. However, not all projects have the same impact or align equally with our mission or short term goals. Hourly time tracking allows us to evaluate which projects provide the most value and satisfaction.
Incentivising instead of penalising definitely aligns more with Giveth’s culture I believe.
2 Likes
Thank you everyone for your comments, this has been a spicy one! 
Although it’s challenging as DAO Ops lead to have to process and navigate amongst such varied and strong opinions, I am inspired. This is proof that our DAO is alive and well; that people feel empowered to say what they think and engage in important discussions.
My post regarding mandatory clockify has been up for 8 days at time of writing and has received 25 votes on the soft-poll!
Based on comments/poll results and our discussion in the DAO Ops crew we have come to these conclusions:
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Clockify will be mandatory for all contributors getting paid from the Giveth DAO.
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The rewards scheme related to GIV vesting will be applied beginning the Q3 vesting round.
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Everyone needs to use Clockify themselves, nobody else will enter your hours for you. You have many options of how you choose to go about it, just look at Griff’s comment above.
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The new Clockify workspace will focus much less on tracking time spent on tasks and more on the broader categorization of where you spent your time. Specifying your task is not required but specifying the project (WG/Chapter/Project/IRL Event/PTO etc…) is required. This should be much easier given that you might have only 7-8 categories of where to log your time instead of 30-40, much less overwhelming.
We’ll be publishing more content and guides around Clockify to make things straightforward for everyone. DAO Ops greatly appreciates your patience around this matter as we continue to experiment and iterate on our subDAOification process. 
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