Agency life: measuring how much of the day is client work
· 6 min read
Measure your own day at app level for two weeks, then set it beside the hours you logged to client codes in the agency’s timesheet. The difference is the internal day: stand-ups, chat, reviews, estimates, admin. It is almost always larger than the utilization target assumes, and seeing it in your own record is the first step to negotiating a day that has more making in it.
Two numbers that should match and do not
Agencies run on utilization: the share of your hours that lands on a client code. The timesheet produces that number. But a timesheet is a reconstruction, filled in at 5:30 pm or on Friday afternoon, and what goes in it is what you remember doing. What you remember is the client work. The forty minutes in chat between tasks, the stand-up that ran long, the three times you opened the ticket tracker to check something: those become a rounding error, or they get folded into the nearest client code because something has to be written there.
So there are two numbers. Utilization, which the agency sees. And the actual composition of your day, which nobody sees, including you. Measuring the second does not replace the first. It tells you how honest the first is, and where your day is going when it is not going to a client.
A personal measurement alongside the agency’s system
This is a measurement of your own day, for you. It is not a replacement for the agency’s timesheet, which you still fill in, and it is not something you are obliged to show anyone.
- Pick two ordinary weeks. Not the pitch week, not the one with the offsite.
- Run an app-level record on your own Mac. Punchcard does this from the menu bar without timers: it notices which app is in front, and at your closing time prints a receipt of the day, one line per app with its time, a total at the bottom. It asks for no macOS permissions, records app names only (never window titles, documents, URLs or screen contents), and has no networking code, so it is not a monitoring tool and cannot report to anyone. What employee monitoring software sees and what a personal tracker should not spells out the difference.
- Fill in the agency timesheet as you normally would. Do not change how you log. The point is to compare the record with your normal reporting, not with an improved version of it.
- At the end of each day, note the hours you logged to client codes next to the receipt total. Two numbers per day, ten days.
- On the second Friday, total both columns. The receipt column is the day you had; the timesheet column is the day you reported as client work. Subtract.
Reading an agency receipt
A receipt from an agency day has a recognizable shape, and the app lines map onto activities more reliably than you might expect.
The meeting app is meetings, and the time on that line is usually the biggest surprise: a day with “a couple of calls” tends to print at two to three hours. Meetings versus making is about measuring this split in particular.
The chat app is the agency’s nervous system, and its line is the cost of being reachable. Most of it arrives in two-minute pieces, which is why the line is always longer than it feels.
The browser is a mixture: research for a client, the ticket tracker, the timesheet itself, and drift. Punchcard cannot tell these apart, because it does not see URLs; a browser line is a browser line. If the browser is a large part of your client work, note that in your daily line so you do not mistake it for drift.
The editor, design tool or IDE is the making. This line is the one that should correlate with your client hours, and comparing it with the timesheet is where the interesting gaps appear.
What the gap is made of
When the receipt total is eight and a half and the client hours are five and a half, the three hours in between have a composition, and it is worth naming the parts.
Coordination. Stand-ups, check-ins, status calls. These are the agency’s overhead, and they are real work that nobody bills a client for.
Context switching. The minutes lost every time you move from one client’s work to another’s, or from work to chat and back. A receipt cannot measure switching directly, but a day with the making app at three hours in many short blocks is a day that was switched apart. The real cost of switching apps all day covers what that does to output.
Internal projects. The pitch, the case study, the new-business deck. Often logged to a non-billable code, sometimes not logged at all.
Drift. The remainder. Nobody’s drift is zero, and an honest number for it is more useful than a flattering one.
Misattribution. Some of the gap will be client work that you forgot to log, which is the one part of the gap you can fix on Monday by logging it.
What to do with the number
The number is yours first. Before anything else, it tells you how much making is in a day, which is the thing that decides whether the work feels good. Many people discover the making line is shorter than they assumed, and understand why the day feels full while the ticket does not move.
Then it becomes a tool for asking for things. “I would like Tuesday and Thursday mornings meeting-free” is a request. “My receipts show three hours a day in meetings and chat, and the making is two and a half” is a case. You choose whether to show the receipts; they export as a PNG or plain text with no document names on them, which makes them safe to share if you want to. Proof of work for yourself, not your boss is about keeping that choice yours.
Finally, the comparison makes your timesheet more honest. Once you know that a day with six logged client hours printed at five in the making app, you start logging the coordination where it belongs, and the agency’s utilization number becomes a better reflection of the studio than it was.
What this is not
Be clear about the limits. Punchcard tracks one person’s Mac, and only which app is in front. It has no team features, no shared dashboard, no client codes, no projects, no rates and no reporting to anyone. It cannot replace an agency timesheet, cannot tell which client a block of editor time was for, and cannot be used to measure other people. If your question is “how do we track the team’s time,” this is not the tool, and nothing in this post pretends otherwise. If your question is “what is my day actually made of,” it is.
Questions
Will running a tracker on my work Mac cause problems?
Check your agency’s software policy. Punchcard asks for no macOS permissions, makes no network connections, and stores a single SQLite file in your home folder, so it is unusually easy to explain. Ask if you are unsure.
Can I use the receipts to fill in the agency timesheet?
Partly. A receipt gives you the day’s length and the time in the making app, which is a strong prompt for what to log. It does not know which client the time was for, so you still need your own memory or notes for the codes. It removes the “how long was I on this” guess, not the “which client” one.
What if the agency already runs monitoring software?
Then your day is already being measured, for them. A personal record is still worth keeping, because it is yours, it shows only app names, and it lets you see the day before anyone else’s interpretation of it arrives.
Should I show my manager the gap?
Only if it helps you. A gap between the day and the client hours is normal in every agency; the question is whether yours is bigger than it needs to be, and what specific change would shrink it. Go in with the change you want, and the receipts as the reason.