I've had mixed results with more coarsely grained time tracking. On the one hand I'm more likely to actually do so when I don't have to clock in and out all the time. On the other hand, I kept forgetting to clock in or out because it wasn't 'regular' enough to do it automatically.

These days I use Emacs org-mode for todo items and time tracking (+ pretty much everything else), which makes it much easier to be extremely granular in my tracking without having to expend much effort. Since I have my todo list in front of me for any task anyways, starting the clock is just one keystroke away.

That said, I try to keep myself from calculating how much time I 'need' to save to offset the time it took me to get everything set up and to get comfortable with Emacs/Org-Mode ;).

> That said, I try to keep myself from calculating how much time I 'need' to save to offset the time it took me to get everything set up and to get comfortable with Emacs/Org-Mode ;).

Between increased efficiency, less proverbial papercuts from alternative ways of doing things to cause your death, and things you just didn't do before you reduced your friction, switching to Emacs/Org-Mode has probably paid for itself many times over :).

I've had great success tracking my team, and my team's time, by the day. On the level of "I'm working on project A, project A is now done and I'm now working on project B." It's obviously imperfect but it's good enough to prevent the edge cases, e.g. somebody spending a month on something low priority.

I only care about coarse grained time tracking on my team. I estimate to the quarter day at the smallest, if any task is smaller than that, it shouldn't be a separate WBS item. After all, my end-of-year bean-counter statistics are all based on person days anyways, and I'm not a consultant, so why would I care about tracking to the 15 minute increment?

I was thinking the same thing about 72 hours ago, I mean 3 days ago. In certain fields, like filmmaking, freelancers don't charge by the hour. They have a day rate. You pay them for the whole day or not at all. Some let you hire them for half a day.