Sabrina Dent: Freelance web designer, developer and internet marketer living in Cork, Ireland with one dog and a husband in no particular order.
You've Got To Be Kidding Me
Awhile back, a client I gig for on an hourly rate asked me to send in not only my total number of hours, but some basic record of what I’d spent those hours on when submitting invoices. This seemed reasonable enough to me, so I spent a few hours one weekend trying out various online tools and applications for time tracking.
I probably cruised through five or six, rejecting them for various reasons, before I found the perfect time tracking website for my specific needs. It was free (for one client, anyway, and I only have one client who needs this), it had excellent categorisation, and it was really easy to use. It was so great that I actually meant to blog it, but I never got around to it.
I kept it open in a browser tab for an entire week, logging minutes and hours as I expended them, totally happy with my new system and sure that my client would be, too, when it came time to invoice. Then the work cycled down, only to cycle back up again recently. And what with it being the end of the month and all, I’m really looking forward to sending off my February invoice.
Except I cannot remember the name of the frigging site.
And I am not even making that up.
Update: Found it! Thanks for all the suggestions. Turned out to be TickSpot. Great service, but… that’s a brand? It sounds like a flea collar!
29 Feb 2008
| In: Domesticities |
That would be a very cool tool to keep track of my procrastination techniques, and scare myself into finishing my thesis. But I feel your pain, and indeed this losing stuff in the ether/Internet has happened more than once. I use delicious, but not so much, never really spent the time to organize it sufficiently, Google Notebook is my saviour :)
29.02.2008, 9:01 amsome guesses:
29.02.2008, 9:40 amhttp://www.blinksale.com/home
http://1timetracking.com/
http://www.getharvest.com/
http://www.basecamphq.com/
http://www.proworkflow.com/
Perhaps it’s in your browser history? Or Google Desktop?
29.02.2008, 12:44 pmI have done the same thing 3 times with a password tracker I use for like everything and would be totally lost without. After hours trawling google I did eventually find it… (safe in delicious now)
29.02.2008, 1:25 pm1timetracking.com is an Irish company I believe. I tried a bunch of these for awhile including a Mac utility called “Dashboard” which integrates with Basecamp but it is hard to beat an oul spreadsheet just to write everything down at the end of the day, the old fashioned way.
29.02.2008, 4:29 pmShit.. Mac utility for the Dashboard called “Timepost”. Sorry, it’s Friday evening.
29.02.2008, 4:30 pmHey, thanks for all the suggestions. I finally found it by searching my (terribly unorganised) Gmail for “registration” and trawling through the results. It’s, umm, TickSpot!
Which, I think, is more of a branding failure on their part than an old age failure on mine, but I could be wrong there…
A few years ago I was working in a pretty fast moving company – the CEO was one of these “driven” and intense characters who was pretty much tasked with keeping the company moving at 200 miles an hour.
One of the policies he brought in was the weekly CEO report – it worked 2 ways. First of all we were required to submit a report directly to him on the Friday afternoon of each week. On Monday morning he would send out his report to all of us highlighting the main successes of the Company that week, highlights of all the reports etc. I suppose on the one hand it ensured that we had a constant dialogue with the CEO, and he knew what we were all doing.
Since leaving that company I have kept the habit – submitting a weekly report to my clients / boss / project manager or whatever. It’s always welcome and if anyone wants to know what I was doing at any point I can go back over old reports and explain what I was working on etc.
Simple habit, well received by employers and easy to keep up.
02.03.2008, 8:04 pmInteresting; it never occurred to me that something so massively useful would be out there. I’ll give it a try.
We’ve just got a new boss who’s having us submit weekly accounts of ourselves. I keep track of all that on paper in daily to-do lists that I find oddly comforting. But this could be very helpful for some of the actual hourly billing I’m asked to do. Thanks for putting me onto that.
BTW, I use SpashID for keeping track of ID/password combos and a lot more. It travels with me on my (oh now uncool) Palm Pilot, and lives at my home desktop. Very very very handy. I see you can also sync it with hipper devices including smartphones, so may be of some use.
02.03.2008, 10:19 pm