When tracking time, should I separate the project from its hours?

Question

I have designed an application to keep track of employees' weekly projects. Basically they want to enter the hours they worked for each project throughout the week.

1. In the first screenshot, users choose the week, enter their name, create a project in the left box. Once they hit "Add", a row will be added to the grid on the right. Then users can enter the hours for each day.

2. They can continue until they finish adding all the projects. The result is the second screenshot.

The biggest concern is that initially all the information was displayed in the grid. Should I separate the project from its hours (as shown here)? Or should I keep them in the same grid even each row will be much wider?

Answer 1

You should separate project entry and time entry into separate screens. Why? Because nine times out of ten, the employee will use the tool to track time for a pre-existing project. So from a user-centered design point of view, you should design the main screen to support the main use case.

How we do it where I work is that project leads manage projects and regular employees just do time tracking. This makes sense from the perspective that project leads know the facts and details about projects (like how much we charge per hour, and how billable it is), but also because project leads' job includes boring stuff like making projects in a time tracking tool. Regular employees should be shielded from non-essential stuff as much as possible, so we make sure they don't have to do much else than jump into the tool, enter their hours, and then close the app once a day.