Thank you to a ‘friendly-peer review group’ for their feedback on a research project focused on tracking micro-time spent by senior volunteers. The discussion covered user interface importance, managing time granularity, and the complexity of capturing incidental volunteer activities.

Thank You Team!

A huge thank you to a friendly-peer review group who gathered on November 21, 2024, to hear me ramble and provided excellent comments. A shout out in particular to Anne-Marie A., Curtis A., Danielle A., Larry N., Nick T., and Patsy C. I will buy a full Zoom subscription so that in the future you don’t have to suffer through wonkiness of Skype!

Thoughts and Comments

Some of the observations included the following:

• The Container Rules the Content. Like it or not, the user-interface (UX) will determine whether a system is used.
• Granularity and Goldilocks. Deciding what level to track time and helping people to not be too detailed nor too gross in their entries is something that organizations need to manage. This involves both the tool, policy, and icky things like personalities.
• Too Little, Too Much, What Counts. The central question of this research project is whether incidental minutes spent by senior volunteers could be captured.
  • Possible problems with this include under reporting (forget to enter the time) or inflated time.
  • Inflation may be for nefarious reasons like self-importance or benign reasons such as the following example:
    • A board member attending an event may socialize, conduct business, fix a printer, and give a speech – is this one-time block or four?
    • Is chatting with volunteers and catching up with friends counted or not?
    • Solution: the organization decides based on the principles of Paying your Volunteers Well; this is offset that the time records become public documents.
    • Volunteering is your hobby and not your job, enjoy the experience but be honest and act with integrity.
• Plan, Do, Act, Check. Test the UX and process, fix it and re-test. Iterations is the name of the game offset with the maximum that ‘perfection is the enemy of the good‘ [1].
• Better Tools. There are many excellent Volunteer Management Tools out there that can capture things like managing shifts for ‘worker-bee’ level volunteers. This research project is about capturing micro-time spent by senior volunteers.
• Data Trumps. Assuming you can overcome a bad UX and land at a data entry rhythm, then hard data can help organizations make decisions.

What Happens Next

I will set up a Google Sheet which has the IPOOG Time Tracking Tool. Google will be used as it is operating system agnostic (Apple, Windows, Android) and can be easily shared. The following individuals will track the indicated personal interests for about 2 months.

1. Danielle: setting up a cycling trip to Japan.
2. Anne-Marie: time spent supporting a fund-raising event for the MS society, grant writing for a church, and supporting Danielle’s cycling trip.
3. Patsy: time spent supporting a local botany group.

Early February 2025, reconvene the larger peer group to hear about the experiences from the three testers. Between then, optional check in sessions will be held with the testers (and invites to the peer group) to establish best practices for the tool and tracking time.

Based on the above, a larger webinar or conference may be held discussing the benefits and challenges of asking senior volunteers to track time. Input from industry may be solicited such as VMS vendor(s) or work force management tools (e.g. monday.com).

There is an “I” in IPOOG!

If you would like to hang out and hear the results firsthand, feel free to reach out to me and say ‘I want to hear/help/use’ the IPOOG methodology!

Notes and References

1. I have been using this aphorism for years (thank you Gary E.). I had not realized its long history nor its connection to Voltaire, Wikipedia.