I started tracking time while recovering from my near-fatal crash; I knew no matter how much time & energy I put into recovery the insurance company (ICBC) would argue it wasn’t enough. Since then I’ve worked as a contractor consultant where tracking time is a job requirement.
I’ve come to believe time tracking for everyone is important. Maybe you’re an employee and your boss asks how long you spent on a given task or project. Maybe you deal with customers and the company wants to know how much time a bad customer is sucking up. Or maybe you’re a contractor who wants to bill clients fairly and accurately.
During recovery I used computer scripts to track what windows were open and used my calendar to track all non-computer time.
My employer then had a ticket/tracking solution. It was incredibly time consuming to enter any given time data so most staff entered all data at the end of each week or month. I challenge you at the end of any given week to recall what you did in .25hr blocks. The only alternative is billing by minimum 1-4hr blocks but that’s not fair to the client when responding to a client email could take just 15 minutes.
My next attempt was a Google form and spreadsheet. That’s all well and good but it still relies on you to regularly remember to enter data. After 2 days of forgetting to record your activities & tasks you quickly realize it’s not a viable solution nor is any better than entering data in your calendar for record keeping.
I then spent a whole bunch of time looking at Pomodoro solutions and mobile apps. Phones have the ability to display notifications and steal your attention that helps remembering to record data. I found only 1 Pomodoro solution, pomotodo.com, that recorded time and tasks completed. I’ve tried Pomodoro many times in my life and always end up frustrated about the hard time blocks. If you have a task that takes 5 minutes then you still have to find another task that’ll take up the remaining 15 minutes. If you have a task that takes 25 minutes then you have to remember to complete the remaining 5 minutes in the next time-sprint. I also find a break every 20 minutes is sometimes too many breaks sometimes not enough depending on my mental state and workload.
That all leads me to the solution I’ve now built for myself:
It’s fairly simple, once an hour it plays a sound and displays an alert() box to interrupt your task. It automatically breaks hours into 15min blocks and records projects/tasks/notes worked on in those blocks. Being a simple HTML form I can tab through the entries and fill it out in under 15 seconds. Being every hour its easy enough to remember what you did for the last hour of your life. And I specifically designed it small enough to work well on a mobile interface.
It’s certainly working well for me and provides an audit trail for detailed client billing.