Updates to Work Diary: Feedback and Questions

[kochubei_valeria]

Work Diary is getting some updates to improve the mobile experience and overall responsiveness. Check out the announcement here and let us know your thoughts about these updates as you log time in Work Diary.

[georgejonesiv]

One would think that our input would have been sought out before making changes to something that affects our ability to get things done.

[johncole21]

Hi everyone,

Just gonna chime in here. Client names need to be clearly visible at all times! Visually it looks nicer, but the update has made it so much harder for me to enter my work hours. I need to go to my contracts page to find out what is the exact name of the contract and only then am I able to find the correct contract and enter hours. 

Time and time again, Upwork has proven that whoever makes the decisions regarding basically anything on this platform has never actually used the platform. Please at least try and contact some users (both clients and freelancers) before you roll something out - it's really not that hard to get it right.

[c030cb08]

Hi Upwork.

I noticed that the find work page's URL was changed from ab/find-work to nx/find-work.

When I exit from the job detail page, the nx/find-work page was scrolled to the previous clicked job detail item.

I would like this to be fixed quickly.

Thanks.

[g_vasilevski]

Hi Oleksandr,

Could you try to log out > clear your cache and cookies > log in again and let me know if you're still seeing the same URL on your end? Thank you.

[c030cb08]

I cleared cache, but still see nx/find-work

[g_vasilevski]

Hi Oleksandr,

I checked this further and would like to confirm that this is a known problem with the new Find Work Home page layout. Our engineers are already working to address it. We'll be merging this thread into the thread we have dedicated to feedback and questions about the new layout. Thank you.

[lucioric]

The blocks grouping is a good idea, but now the screenshot pop-up has the image very small, and if you want to see the activity level, you have to scroll down (it does not fit in the window, but you could show an activity level resume in the visible screen). That because when we review the work diary of our week, we review, for example for 30 hours, 180 screenshots. Also, it should include 'Next' and 'Previous' buttons, as it were in the previous version of the work diary.

[kirkh]

Grouping is terrible. If I don't track slot here and there it's completely impossible to find out where exactly I lost 10 (or 20, or 30) minutes.
How should I find it out? Compering end time and start time of all segments. Nonsense.

Please bring back old understandable grid. I can leave with strange colors but this...

There is no much sense to discuss popups when the root feature became usable. Sorry.

[tmcdos]

It looks like Upwork are getting more and more reluctant of chatting with freelancers who try to contact the support team through the live chat. Just a couple of weeks ago, there still was a button named "Chat with a person" at the end of all the other useless chatbot buttons. Today I noticed that there is no such button and you're expected to click on "How to use the chat" where you will be informed that you have to type "talk to a human" in order to reach a live person.

I miss the oldschool support ticket systems on other websites when there were no chatbots and it was pretty straightforward to quickly and simply open a ticket with your issue. 

[kochubei_valeria]

Hi All,

I encourage you to check out the update Mike provided for the announcement here. 

Mike J. wrote:

Hey Everyone. Thank you for the feedback you’ve shared. We’ve heard you and we’re working hard on improvements. The first set of changes we’re working on are those that we can tackle the quickest. Over the next couple of months, we plan to implement the following changes:

• Add Client name to contract list
• Change activity codes from standard dropdown to searchable dropdown
• Increase screenshot size on desktop to restore the 6-segment row
• Set talent timezone as the default, rather than UTC

These are just the changes we believe we can implement fairly quickly. There are more updates to come. Stay tuned and please continue to share your feedback in the Community discussion!

---

[tta192]

Can we use connects for switching to the previous version of the work diary? like, 10 connects for a one week subscription ? just like the "active" thing works on the profile

[joechiu]

Over the next couple of MONTHS?

[researchediting]

---

Joseph C wrote:

Over the next couple of MONTHS?

---

I guess it takes more resources to fix stuff than it does to break it.

[svspit]

Hi fellow freelancers,

I'm so much curious, how many out of you are not happy (at all) to see (and I guess to use as well) new work diary?

It's a real torture to see it now - it's display is counter logical now - how many times per hour (and upwork is for working and being paid per hour) our timte tracker is sending screenshots? 7, or maybe 8 times per hour? I'm even not mentioning the fact that Images of screenshots become smaller.

Can some one please bring 6-in-a-row design back?

[phynds]

You are not alone! I hate it. Wishing they’d bring back view with NO screenshots.

[wescowley]

---

Valeria K wrote:

I encourage you to check out the update Mike provided for the announcement here. 

---

Valeria, a couple of things on this:

Re the update itself, there's no obvious way from looking at the announcement page that these posts were updated. Had you not posted this, I would never have seen the update. It would be helpful if those updates were made as separate posts or if there was some other indication to say, hey look here.

And, as broken as the work diary page currently is, those changes can't wait two months. Please revert it until the changes are ready.

[firescue17]

At what stage of the "... next few months of improvements ..." will the 80-minute hours be reverted to reflect a time span that occurs here on the planet of Earth?

[alyabikhov]

Months? With all the respect, Valeria, Upwork doesn't provide services for free - it takes pretty noticeable fees. Work Diary turned into an absolutely unusable thing. Adding clients' names mustn't take "MONTHS". All this sounds disappointing.

[decodistny]

Weeks later, nothing has changed?

You would think that the time logging system (which generates revenue for Upwork and everyone on the platform) would be an all-hands / top-priority / work-the-weekend kind of thing.

Please just fix right away, or roll it back.

[svspit]

oh and the good news upwork have heard our voice 🙂

looking froward to see it 6 in a row again, but, what, wait a minute, in , omg, a couple of months??

[ivvett]

My app did not register time for me out of 11.50 hours worked last week it only registered 9.20 Hoping to get this resolved as it's under review as we speak. Please HELP!! I tried sending a chat and no luck with that. I also can't upload it here for some reason although it is pdf format. 

[BojanS]

Hi Alina Ivvett,

Do you have any specific day that is missing the time you're referring to? 

[kobor]

Any news ?

Every 2-3rd day i'm wasting time workarounding upwork problems instead of generating revenue.

[svspit]

ok, thanks for forwarding my post into this thread! I'm just satisfied to see I'm not alone in experiencing what I mentioned.

LOL I had taken an step by step intro to this new UI and each time I got an hint (one to four?) on what was done that hint was pointing to a completely empty space on the screen while still telling me something important. Basically the fact you had to make that kind of guide for people clearly illustrates you are not able to make it good enough without teaching people how to use it - we are not 5-year old kids for being taught basic things that are meant to be very very very clear from the first sight.

[ivvett]

Last Wed through Fri for sure. Possibly Tues.

[2a05aa63]

love seeing only the time when there was a screenshot. So much cleaner!

[phynds]

What happened to the list view? So much easier on the eyes. Than having to look at boxes spread out. Please bring list view back in addition so we have a choice of how we want to view.

[kochubei_valeria]

Hi All,

Please, see Mike's post here for information about the updates that were just implemented on the Work Diary page:

---

Mike J. wrote:

The following changes were implemented today:

• Add Client name to contract list
• Change activity codes from standard dropdown to searchable dropdown
• Increase screenshot size on desktop to restore the 6-segment row
• Set talent timezone as the default, rather than UTC

---

[brevon]

Hi Valeria,

I can see neither the post nor any of the above implemented on my work diary. Is there something that needs to be done on my end to see those changes? 

Regards,

Pavla

[kochubei_valeria]

Hi Pavla,

I've fixed the link and it should now lead to the correct post. Apologies for that. 

Additionally, I've checked on your account and I see that the changes are already reflecting. For example if you click on the contract drop down, you should be able to see clients names underneath each contract name. 

[brevon]

Hi Valeria,

Thanks for the fix! I can also see the changes now, I believe that clearing the cashes helped.

P.

[danielgomezr]

These changes are making me choose between overcharging my clients or working for free by not letting me correct simple mistakes made while tracking time. I don't see how this improves the mobile experience in any way. 

[firescue17]

These changes don't improve the experience. But thatz no matter.

[tmcdos]

Not so long ago (actually, just a 2 or 3 months or even less), the drop-down list for hours and minutes in the Diary was rendering some items disabled - specifically those that correspond to time slots that have already been filled, either in the same project or in any of the other active projects.

Right now, all HH:MM items in the drop-down list in Diary are available for choosing - and you will receive an error only when you try to submit the time-log entry.

I really miss a feature where a simple table/grid containing all the possible time slots for the current date (with empty or filled cells - to show whether the slot is occupied or not) will be always visible in the Diary no matter which project is currently chosen from the drop-down list - as depicted in red on the screenshot:

Also - the name of the client is visible when the drop-down list with projects is expanded but when it is collapsed (like on the screenshot) then only the name of the project is seen but not the name of the client.

[firescue17]

**Edited for Community Guidelines**

Pleeze simply delete this entire idea of "making things better (while ruining everything)" and go back to the original format.

And then leave well enough alone!

Why is the entire Upwork Community forced to waste $100ks of lost income and service fees trying to poke and prod through this non-compliant user interface failure?

[a_lipsey]

I wanted to report that I have seen that the tech team has added client names back to the work diary. Please send along my thanks. It's much easier now to find the right contract. 

[sfenn2]

Is it possible to adjust the text layout of the work diary so that the time is ranged left under the screenshot, seeing as it's showing the time the 10-minute segment starts, not finishes? The current layout is really confusing! Thanks

[g_vasilevski]

Thank you for your feedback, Sarah, I will share it with our team. 

[firescue17]

This "new" Work Diary is still atrocious. Thanks for killing the only link to the old (good) version without notice. Again.

Simply. Awful.

[lucioric]

Hi. I would like that one can edit all the work memo of a day at a time. Also, I would like that the screenshot detail image was larger, contained a color code for keyboard and mouse activity (useful for my kind of work that I sometimes leave a Python job running while I am eating, so that the CPU activity is high but the keyboard and mouse one is null). Also it would be great to contain links to go to the previous and next screenshot, as was in the old work diary.

Best regards.