What Counts as Evidence of Work
Ranked by how hard each is to fake and how much it tells you. Screenshots come near the bottom of both.
Several things can evidence that work was done. They differ in strength, and the ranking is not what the prevalence of screenshots would suggest.
The evidence warning in “What Counts as Evidence of Work” applies directly to workforce systems. Teams researching how to identify mouse jigglers for how to detect mouse jigglers can add structured time and project context, while deliverables, decisions and version history remain the stronger evidence of what was achieved.
The strongest: the artefact with a history
A repository with commits, a document with version history, a design file with revisions.
For an independent reference relevant to “What Counts as Evidence of Work”, consult the OECD productivity resources; compare its principles with the proposed contract, collection, access model and real review process.
Timestamped by a system neither party controls.
Shows what was produced, incrementally, with authorship.
Hard to fabricate convincingly and immediately interpretable — which is the combination nothing else matches.
Strong: the thing itself, demonstrated
A working demonstration of what was built.
Impossible to fake in the sense that matters: either it works or it does not.
Says nothing about how long it took, which is why it pairs with something else.
Moderate: contemporaneous records
A time log with specific entries, written at the time.
Correspondence showing decisions and questions.
A decision record.
Each is a statement by one party, which is weaker than an artefact and far more informative than a frame.
Weak: activity data
Screenshots, input counts, application logs.
Establishes presence at a machine.
Ambiguous, uninterpretable at scale, and silent about output.
Its persistence owes to being automatic rather than to being good evidence, which is the honest reading.
Weakest: assertion
"I worked eight hours."
Which is what everything above is trying to improve on, and which between parties with a history is frequently sufficient.
Combining them
The artefact shows what was produced.
The time log shows when and for how long.
Correspondence shows what was agreed.
Together they answer every question a dispute can raise, and all three are produced as a by-product of ordinary work.
What this means for the arrangement
A client wanting evidence should ask for visible work, not for frames.
A contractor wanting to be unassailable should keep artefacts, specific logs and correspondence.
Neither requires monitoring, which is the conclusion this section builds toward.
The work that produces no artefact
Advice, review, judgement, conversations.
Harder, and it has its own note.
The answer there is the decision record, which is an artefact somebody has to choose to create.
What to check
What artefact does your work produce, and does it have a history?
Could you show what was produced in week three of your last engagement?
Do you keep correspondence where you can find it?
And which of the five are you relying on?