Excessive time tracking in meetings

[marcos.motta]

I held a 1-hour meeting with my team, but when they included their participation using the time control, the total time was 10 hours, as each one put 1h of participation. How to avoid time overload in this type of issue (meetings)?

[Brant Schroeder · Accepted solution]

@marcos.motta that is the correct amount of time utilized.  If you have a meeting with 10 people for one hour then ten hours of time was used.  The only way to get around this would be to not have onlybone person record there time for one hour but this is not an accurate representation of the time utilized to conduct the meeting.

[marcos.motta]

@Brant Schroeder, thanks for the information!!

I understand that, but it's strange to think that a meeting that is scheduled to take 1 hour ends up taking 10 hours. How should I estimate the time of this meeting, in 10 hours? On the other hand, we use fields like start date and end date in our work items, how to treat these fields to reflect the total meeting time?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Your meeting has not taken 10 hours, I don't understand why you are saying that.

It took one hour, and there were ten people there, each working in it for one hour. 

Yes you should estimate ten working hours for it.

Are you confusing working time with elapsed time here?

[marcos.motta]

@Nic Brough -Adaptavist-, thanks for the feedback. I understand that I might be getting a little confused (I just started using Jira), but this question caught my attention. See the attached image, I see an estimate and a time control, maybe there is no connection between these two fields, but I had thought so! And that's why I opened this thread, to better understand how it works.
Regarding the second point, our use provides for the inclusion of a start time and an end time for each activity, this allows us to define the time of day when the activity was carried out and check the gap between these points.

[marcos.motta]

Sorry, I'm not able to upload the image...

[Brant Schroeder]

@marcos.motta Time tracking is used to track all the time/effort that was put into a given activity.  This is the same across all PM applications.  Even though you scheduled the meeting for a single hour or estimated a single hour the total time put into completing the issue was 10.  I think you just need to consider this when making your estimations.  If you are planning your resources time you used 10 resources for 1 hour each meaning the estimation should be 10 and if everyone attends and reports time you would have 10 hours.  If the meeting was estimated at 10 hours but only went for 30 min the actual time/effort recorded would be 5 hours.  You can not take a start and end time and compare that to effort unless only a single individual was going to be recording effort on that issue. 

[marcos.motta]

@Brant Schroeder, thank you very much for the information, it is now clear that my analysis on the use of this functionality was wrong. I will observe these tips in our meetings.

[Dave Rosenlund _Trundl_]

If I may add to what others have already said, @marcos.motta. 

Think of it this way: If it takes 10 engineers 10 hours to complete a sprint, how many hours of work went into the sprint? It was 100 person-hours (10x10).  Right?

It's the same thing with 10 ppl in a 1 hour meeting.  10 x 1 = 10. 10 person-hours were used. :)

As @Nic Brough -Adaptavist- said, I think you may be confusing elapsed time with work (time).

Hope this helps,

-dave