Customer story / Mieux Donner
How Mieux Donner Uses Time Tracking to Prioritize a Small Team
A co-founder lost track of his own time mid-hire. A year later, automatic tracking is how his whole team decides what to do more of.
Romain Barbe
Co-founder, Mieux Donner, Mieux Donner
Challenge
Mid-way through a hiring round, Mieux Donner's co-founder had lost visibility of his own time. The team had no shared basis for judging what a piece of work had actually cost.
Solution
DoneThat tracks automatically in the background. The co-founder adopted it first, then shared his own data and invited the team to analyze theirs, privately where they preferred.
Results
- A founder's time made visible again
- Team time reviewed every quarter
- A freelancer asked for her own seat
Mieux Donner is a French effective giving organization that helps donors in France and French-speaking Switzerland send their donations to high-impact charities. It was founded in June 2024 by Jennifer Stretton and Romain Barbe, out of the same charity incubation program run by Ambitious Impact, and runs on a team you can count on one hand.
Romain has used DoneThat for close to a year. It started as a way to answer a question about himself, and became the way the team decides what to do more of.
Losing grip on your own time, mid-hire
Small organizations grow in steps, and the step is usually a hire. Deciding on one means knowing what the existing team is already absorbing, which is exactly the thing that gets hard to see when everyone is busy.
"We were at the point where we needed to hire new people, and I was not really aware of where I was spending my time."
Manual timers do not survive that kind of week. DoneThat instead runs in the background and reconstructs the day on its own, so the picture builds whether or not anyone remembers it exists.
"I've been using DoneThat for almost a year now. When I started I was in the middle of a hiring round and I had lost grip on my time. It helped me get that control back."
Sharing the data without watching anyone
After a few weeks of using it himself, Romain did something most managers do in the opposite order. He shared his own data first, then asked the team to try it.
"I share my calendar with my whole team, and I invite them to analyze their own time, even privately."
That distinction matters more than it sounds. The team is not reporting hours upward. Each person holds their own record and decides what to bring to a conversation, which is what makes the record honest enough to be worth having.
It also turned out to be something people asked for rather than tolerated. When a freelancer joined and learned the team was using DoneThat, she wanted a seat of her own.
"She asked to have it, because it takes time tracking off her mental load."
For a freelancer, tracking time is not optional and never stops being admin. Making it automatic removes a running background task rather than adding one.
Deciding what to do more of
The recurring value shows up whenever the team has to prioritize, and it shows up on two rhythms.
Quarterly, when they review strategy, each person can say how their time actually divided and compare that against what the organization said mattered. The conversation starts from a record instead of from recollection.
Day to day, it settles a question that small teams get wrong constantly: whether an impressive piece of work is worth repeating. Being impressed by an article or a campaign says nothing about what it cost to produce.
"Their first intuition is sometimes very different from their real time. Knowing whether something took a lot of time was really useful for prioritizing."
That gap between remembered effort and measured effort is the whole point. Doubling down on work that quietly consumed a fortnight is a different decision from doubling down on work that took an afternoon, and without a record the two look identical.