Getting started!

Marie Vail

Background

The

Sweat Equity Ventures⁠

team started using a variation of Shishir Mehrotra’s

Color What Matters Calendar Guide⁠

(that syncs calendar data into a doc) to understand how we were spending time across portfolio companies, projects, and meetings.

The

SEV calendar sync template⁠

has categories specific to our work, and we collectively report on our time spend in this doc. We found tremendous value in shared reporting, especially while our team is remote.

Workflow

Each team member completes their own calendar analysis in a copy of the

Color What Matters doc⁠

Sweat Equity's Template⁠

Everyone inputs their time into this doc in the

Weekly Team Input⁠

section for each relevant category.

The

Input Totals⁠

section tallies the hours spent across categories, which can be filtered by date and is viewable by everyone on the team.

Each person can see their historical time inputs in the

Personal View⁠

section, which is filtered to the name of the current user.

You can customize and add categories to measure by updating the

Category List⁠

table as priorities or projects change.

Recommendations

If you have specific categories you want to track (like SEV does for each of our portfolio companies), consider personalizing a copy of the doc for your use case then distributing it to your team.

If team members are reluctant to sync their calendar data and categorize it (it does take 5-10 minutes, depending on the number of events in your calendar) they can skip that step and manually total their hours and add it to the Team Input table.

The data is less accurate, but it is better to have some imperfect data than none.

If you have feedback on the doc’s usability or recommendations on improving it please reach out to

Marie Vail⁠

on LinkedIn.

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