Naming activities

Activity naming is highly flexible which means they can represent much more than what you're doing.

It's triplets!

Each activity has three name parts which internally we store as,

• Company name

• Project name

• Activity name

We present this triplet format as a single combined name, separated by > characters, e.g.

Sisyphus Corp > Forth Bridge > Painting

Super flexible

We sometimes use the company name to make guesses about activities that go together, for example when we're trying to recommend and highlight which workflow to link to an activity, but otherwise the company name is rarely used.

So the first part, the company name, is the only slightly meaningful bit. Therefore you can use activities to represent anything that you might track time against, such as:

• XYZ Corp > Training > Offsite

• Hudson Yards > Building 1 > Site Visit

• Mike and Phils > Western Road > Plumbing

• ABC Shipping > LA Port - Shanghai > Loading

• ZYX Leisure > 42nd Street > 6am - 2pm

• ZZZ Cinemas > 10am - 6pm > Front Desk

Flexible right? Work sites and even shift patterns can easily be represented using this activity format.

How activities show on timesheets

Zipwire draws a stacked bar under each day with colors for each activity proportional to the amount of time spent.

Before being sent, the bars indicate the time you've logged in your journal so you can make adjustments if you feel you've under worked or over worked. Once sent, these bars will be made the same length as the units you've billed for so that recipients cannot infer what you've logged in your private journal.

The timesheet includes a key which shows the proportions across the whole timesheet.

You may have noticed that people don't tend to turn up to work exactly on the minute, or leave exactly on time, every single day. We get stuck in traffic, or something bad happens right at the end of the day, or your boss strikes up a long chat just as you're putting your coat on.

Before you send the timesheet, when only you can see it, the full length of the bar is representative and proportional to exactly how long you tracked in your journal. But, when you send the timesheet, the bar will be shrunk or grown so it matches the total units you are billing for.

Therefore, Zipwire doesn't directly communicate how long you tracked in your private journal for anything, only what you put down on your timesheet.

Receivers of your timesheet can only infer roughly what proportion of your day was spent on a particular activity.

In cases where people only do one thing in their working day, the bar will be a single solid color representing 100% of the billed time, and timesheet recipients will see the bar as the same length as the number of blocks of time units you've billed for.

Companies vs. clients

If you're using Zipwire and have been assigned a workflow by your agency, head-office or HR department, then they will also have setup a client within Zipwire.

The company name part of the activity has no direct connection to the client name; if they're the same, then that's cool, and if they're not, then it doesn't matter.

This is because activities are linked to workflows, and workflows are linked to assignments, and assignments are linked to clients, so the actual name doesn't much matter.

The activities are written to the timesheet to indicate what you were working on, and less about who for. That said, if the company name is wildly different it can be a good indicator that someone has linked the wrong thing to the wrong workflow.

If you have not been assigned the workflow and you chose to create a Zipwire account and track time and bill your customers, then the company name part of the activity will matter.