Time Tracking Software Reviews
The best time tracking software reviews and methods
Wow! The country of Japan asked their citizens to include a record of what they were doing in 15 minute intervals. This was done as part of their census and what’s best is they released the data publicly and Jonathan Soma took the results and made a visual graph of the data. Sweet!
Tip: Click on the small text link that says “Everything” to expand the view, or double click on the graph to zoom.
I got the link via Kottke.org.
Dailyhoopla which bills itself as “Your Daily Dose of Phoenix Tech News” has apparently “found” a printout of a screen from Minuteglass. Sweet! Something to talk about as we are in development.
The screen in question is the “Recorded Time” page which lets you edit the time you’ve entered or recorded. I sure can’t wait to show you the rest of this page and what it does. Sometime soon… we’re still in development.
http://dailyhoopla.com/2008/10/got-a-minute/
We’ve been working on a brand new site for Minuteglass. Initially we’re just going to launch a new one page site that answers questions about the app and invites people to the beta. Then later launch a full site.
We’ve been getting inspiration from a couple of design sites. Two links in particular I wanted to share with you are One Page Love and the Launch Soon gallery.
We recently had a bit of a revelation at our office. We’ve been under such a crunch with client projects who hire us to develop their web sites that we found it difficult to focus on Minuteglass development. Well, our revelation is that if we have specific times set aside each week where we work as a team together, it works far better.
So what we did this week was set aside a couple of specific afternoons to work together on the project. While we were all working on separate aspects of the app, the collaborative nature of the project was restored and we were able to get a lot done.
If your team is having trouble making progress, I’d highly recommend it as a strategy. It sounds simple, but often with large projects team members have a tendency to work separately.
Today is the second birthday for this blog. Track The Time has had a fantastic start. The best is yet to come however, when we release our product and change the time tracking world (or so we hope!).
Thanks for everyone that is a reader. Also, note the clever title with every word beginning with a “t”!
The Word Clock is an interesting typographic experiment.
It is also a screensaver for OS X and Windows! Be sure to check it out, it’s quite cool and worth installing.
“I’ve saved dozens of hours” — Tom Chapin
Here at the office Tom occasionally has to write Regular Expressions. He’s come to depend on a tool called RegexBuddy (for Windows) which he purchased for only $40. A really great value when you consider the time he’s saved.
Me? I don’t use regular expressions, I use Extra-Large Expressions. 😉
A reader asks about tracking time on OS X:
Chris,
So here’s the deal: I now find myself with clients — people who are paying me money to do stuff for them. How cool is that? For some, I’ve set up a monthly set fee, others I’m charging by the hour. But for both, I’d like to track time on a slice-by-slice basis and give them a nice and fancy set of reports on how much time I spent doing what.
For the majority of what I do, I’m doing it right here on the MacBook Pro. So a nice little tool bar or icon on the task bar would be handy. What do you recommend?
Signed,
A Reader
Chris responds with a few time tracking suggestions:
Hello Reader,
Thank you for asking, we’ve researched a number of time-tracking apps and made a handy list of time tracking software at www.timetrackingresources.com — check it out!
A popular time tracking application that works across Windows and Mac is Harvest (but get the widget so you can track time from the desktop).
And there is a Mac Desktop widget called TimePost2 you can purchase that works with a lot of different time tracking web apps.
One more recommendation: Billings. We’ve heard from many satisfied customers of Billings that it is a useful tool.
Use one of those programs until Minuteglass, our own software application, is released. Minuteglass is going to be released by Tornado later this year. It’s a time tracking application (for Web, OS X, and Windows).
I hope that helps!
Regards,
Chris
I recently ran across a new web app called Now Do This. I’ve enclosed a screenshot to show what it looks like. It basically remembers your to-do items and only shows you what you should do next.
Tonight I noticed an article in Business Week called The 10 Commandments of Web Design.
The article also has a neat slideshow called “best and worst of the web” which is worth the time and shouldn’t be missed!
The other night I had dinner with a friend and he showed me a neat application he uses called TinyAlarm.
TinyAlarm is a Mac only tool which is free and installs easily on your taskbar. You can quickly set a timer and your computer will notify you at that time. It’s super simple, and is perfect for simple stuff like remembering to pick up pizza.
I just watched an interesting interview by Robert Scoble with the founder of RescueTime. In the interview they talk about their product which sits on the desktop and silently tracks which applications you use. Then it helps you see your actual productivity.
Tony Wright, the founder, reveals that by using their own product they realized an efficiency increase when a specific team member took a day off (after long periods of working on their product). Very interesting.
I have to give props to the quality of the video. Scoble really has an excellent setup with multiple cameras rolling at once to provide excellent video.
Lately I have been thinking about goals for this blog. Its ultimate purpose is to promote our own time tracking tool called Minuteglass (sign up for beta and we’ll email you when we’re launching). We’ve decided that sharing interesting tips and tools to help you track your productivity are an essential way to bring value to this blog. So expect more posts like this one in the future.
A recent Dilbert comic proclaims that the key to time management is not wasting time. How true that is.
I recently returned from 3 weeks in Italy and while visiting the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican I was struck by how quickly the ceiling had been painted. Only 4 years! It really made me think about how many people go about their lives hating their jobs, working for people they don’t like, and not really doing anything meaningful.
You know what’s most interesting? It was one of the first painting projects that Michelangelo had ever done. Yeah, seriously isn’t that amazing? Of course he was well known for his abilities with sculpture — a sculptor with little painting experience.
So the lesson to be learned is to always do what you love, and do your best.
Continue Reading:
Just about two years ago I began tracking my time every day while working. In fact, all of us at Tornado started tracking our time. During this two year period I’ve noticed a few key trends and wanted to share my findings.
Having a timer running all day long that tracks both my billable and non-billable time has forced me to constantly evaluate my productivity. In a strange way it acts as a constant reminder to be productive at work. The key is to have the timer running all the time. That way you always have to change the timer from one task to another.
Believe me, there is nothing more inspiring than to look at the time log for the day and see that I earned $700 (or whatever the amount is).
Prior to tracking my time with software, I would jot down notes about what I was working on. Little did I know I was actually forgetting about half of what I had worked on. Plus, it was difficult to remember the exact day I had worked on a project.
We’ve developed some internal tools for helping us sort through all of our time entries and place them on invoices.
The biggest difference we immediately noticed was a lack of stress surrounding client change requests. Suddenly, customers requesting changes became an opportunity to earn more money rather than give free time to a client (if it was within scope).
Two years ago 95% of our projects were on a fixed-bid cost basis. We would estimate a specific dollar amount for each project, and then work hard to try to keep the gig within that estimate.
What we’ve noticed now is that we write half as many proposals, and instead our customers (new and old) work with us on an hourly basis. If you’re in the design business and are looking for a change I can’t recommend it enough.
The biggest change though has been in our momentum. We literally accomplish twice as much as we used to get done. In the past, we would get bogged down with writing customer proposals, spending hours spec’ing out projects, and dealing with customer change requests. Change requests are now an opportunity rather than a cost.
If you’re not sure where to begin, I recommend giving time tracking a try. Make a goal to track all of your time for one week and at the end of the week evaluate your results.
By the way, as a result of tracking my time, I know that 47% of my time in 2007 was billable. Our goal with our upcoming product is to make it easy for everyone to track all of their time.
For all of you folks who work at home in solitude:
Here is a really clever clock which has more than 150 analog hands. Each hand rotates and spells out the hour of the day. In the example photo below, the four is visible. Click here to watch an animation of how it works.
I’ve been thinking about the next generation web design studio quite a bit lately. What makes a team efficient? How can small teams maximize efficiency?
Bob Parsons who runs Go Daddy has written about tracking and measuring important business numbers. I read this and said “yeah, I need to do that.”
One thing I learned early in my business career is that anything of significance that is measured and watched, improves.
Back before I started Parsons Technology I became impressed with something I read about John D. Rockefeller. In fact, I still think about it and use it to this very day. I learned that Mr. Rockefeller was one of the few people in his industry (perhaps the only one) who knew exactly how much it cost to extract, refine and deliver a barrel of oil. In fact, he was entirely aware of all his costs. Knowing this information (and acting on it) gave him a huge competitive advantage. He knew how much he could price a barrel of oil for and still turn a profit. He was always keenly aware of each area of revenue, cost and market share, and he worked on improving in every area. As a result, he did cost saving things like manufacture his own oil barrels, have his own cartage company, and on and on.
The first sentence is the most important. Read it if you skipped over it.
This all brings me to my point. I think it’s very important to track the numbers that make your business a success. I’ve tried to do this over the years and have tracked a large number but never to the extent I want (for numerous reasons, not that I didn’t try).
As I said, I’ve been thinking about the next generation web firm and wondered what numbers you track in your business or where you work? The obvious things like revenue and billable hours are obvious, the less obvious are things like average employee utilization across a period of time, or average timespan to develop a site… How does this affect the bottom line? Does it give you a competitive advantage? I’ve got loads of ideas about things that can be tracked. Putting systems in place to actually track them (consistently) is the next step.