Timers, alarms and stopwatches

Sometimes, all we need is a little added motivation, like an egg timer or alarm, to challenge us to remain focused and get to the finish line. If that’s the case for you, a simple online alarm clock or timer can help boost productivity.

• Naked Alarm Clock. A simple and free online alarm clock, Naked Alarm Clock makes it easy to lose yourself in the task at hand without worrying that you’ll miss your next appointment.

• Your Meditation Timer. If you get annoyed with more-traditional-sounding alarms, a meditation timer might be music to your ears. A soft gong or Tibetan bell can let you know it’s time to change tasks.

• Online Stopwatch. For every type of timer imaginable, look no further than this Online Stopwatch.

Pomodoro timers/trackers

The Pomodoro Technique involves breaking work up into timed 25-minute chunks (known as pomodoros), separated by short breaks to help improve concentration. There are several apps based on the idea.

• Focus Booster. This app helps eliminate the anxiety of time and enhances your focus using the Pomodoro Techinique.

• Pomodoro (Mac only). Another Pomodoro supporter, this app helps you to avoid procrastination and get things done.

Time monitoring/tracking

For the analytical among us, more-detailed automated time tracking and monitoring may do the trick for increasing productive time online.

• RescueTime. This tool lets you track your Internet usage while also allowing you to voluntarily block distracting websites.

• TrackTime. This app allows you to track the time you spend on projects, as well as your web-browsing habits.

Time-out/break reminders

Sometimes the problem with getting things done isn’t our lack of effort but rather constantly overextending ourselves. This is where a forced break or time-out can help.

• Time Out (Mac only). Time Out gently reminds you to take breaks on a regular basis.

• SmartBreak (Windows only). SmartBreak also reminds you to take breaks when working on your computer for long hours.

Website-blocking tools

For many of us, the Internet is filled with tempting distractions that keep us from the task at hand, which is where website-blocking tools come in handy.

• StayFocusd (Chrome extension). This productivity extension for Google Chrome restricts the amount of time you can spend on time-wasting websites.

• Anti-Social (Mac only). Anti-Social keeps you focused by turning off the “social parts” of the Internet, such as Facebook, Twitter and any other sites you specify.

• Freedom. This app locks you away from the Internet for up to eight hours at a time.

• SelfControl (Mac only). SelfControl blocks email and websites for a predetermined period of time.

Concentration/work environments

For those of us who need complete isolation in order to get focused, there are certain tools that hone in on a single task until the job is done.

• FocusWriter. FocusWriter provides a simple, distraction-free writing environment.

• Think (Mac only). This tool limits your attention to one application at any time to keep you from getting distracted.

• Quiet (Mac only). Quiet allows you to focus on a single window while simultaneously fading out others.

• Haze Over (Mac only). This app helps you stay focused on your main window by dimming inactive windows.

• Concentrate (Mac only). Perhaps the most robust of all the apps, Concentrate allows you to create “activities” (for example: design, study, write) with customized actions that run every time you concentrate on a given task.

• Isolator. This tool helps you concentrate by covering up your desktop, its icons and the windows of other applications.

While the Internet has its advantages when it comes to work, it can also be a distraction. But with the right app to help maintain concentration and focus, it’s a lot easier to stay on track and get things done.

What are your favorite focus-boosting apps and tools?

Photo courtesy Flickr user BY-YOUR-⌘

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Tracking and Record Keeping

TimeDoctor focuses on tracking how employees spend their time. The software also includes monitoring and record keeping features. You can see at a glance what your team is working on, and can receive reports on what your team has accomplished in specific time periods. The program effectively acts as a task management tool, as well as tracking software.

The monitoring tools incorporated into TimeDoctor are not entirely automatic. While the software can automatically monitor the use of certain websites, the developers are still working on adding application tracking. Employees will also need to report the specific projects that they’re working on. TimeDoctor randomly takes screen captures to ensure that team members’ reports match reality.

The developers of TimeDoctor also provide time-management tips to help employees make better use of their time during working hours.

You can access a free beta version of TimeDoctor through its website. Once it exits beta, the developers plan to charge 20 cents per work hour logged. The program is available for Mac, Windows and Linux.

The Question of Motivation

I do have a concern about the problems that using a tool like TimeDoctor may create. Team members could easily see such tools as an invasion of privacy. It’s common for employees to feel that it’s okay to take short breaks from their work — in a way, Facebook breaks have become the new smoke breaks.

Managers need to bring in a tool like TimeDoctor with some sensitivity to this issue. Otherwise, it could lead to poor morale, team members attempting to circumvent the system, or less efficiency, because employees feel like they must be always on task. Since TimeDoctor requires interaction by the employee (turning on the software, entering project information, and so on), simply requiring employees to start using such a tool would be problematic at best.

It is absolutely necessary to present software like TimeDoctor as something that will be helpful to employees.  Such tools shouldn’t be used to punish underperforming employees, but should be ways to help employees identify their own work habits and make them more productive.

How do you track your time, and your team’s time?

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The Productivity Meter gives you a “distracted browsing” score, depending on how much time you spend visiting sites like Facebook vs. how much time you spend visiting “productive” sites. You can check your score via a toolbar button, and see how you compare to other Productivity Meter users — to get a more detailed view of your browsing habits, you can click the “Get Detailed Stats” link, which has charts galore. It’s worth noting that the time tracking data is recorded anonymously; you don’t need to create an account or log in to use the service, and you can pause recording at any time.

You can also tweak the settings through the stats page if the sites that are deemed “distracting” or “productive” aren’t applicable for you — for example, RescueTime thinks WebWorkerDaily is distracting, which is obviously inaccurate for me as it takes up a large portion of my working day!

The Productivity Meter is not as detailed as some of the other time tracking apps we’ve featured, and it can only measure time spent in your browser. However, it’s free and only requires a one-click install, and it might just provide some eye-opening insight into your browsing habits. If you read RescueTime founder Tony Wright’s guest post here on WWD last year, you’ll know that he believes time tracking and monitoring tools can be used to improve productivity by giving individuals (and perhaps more controversially, their employers) a deeper understanding of exactly how much time they spend on different activities. Indeed, the Productivity Meter is a way to start down that path of self-knowledge.

How much of your browsing time is productive?

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Freckle is a joy to use, the syntax is easy to learn and the reporting and the “pulse” view is great. What that said, it’s always been kind of a hassle to take this info from Freckle and build my invoices, so I was thrilled to hear that the Freckle team had added invoicing to the service.

I’ve been using Freckle for a while and have a lot of time recorded in there, so I was pleased that I could choose a date and call items before my cutoff as “already billed.” This let me set a clean slate for billable time moving forward for invoicing purposes.

Creating invoices is simple and in true Freckle fashion you can just hop right in. No need to set up anything in advance — choose your project, click “invoice,” adjust the date options if required, and you’re set. You can add your company and client information during invoice creation.

When you create your invoice you can choose to include a full reporting of the time spent or just a total. I like having this choice as it lets me accommodate the needs of the client and our billing terms. For those clients where I can just provide totals the quick reports in Freckle have always let me pull up what I needed, and I could just enter that into my other invoicing app. It was when I needed to provide a full account of my time in detail that it became time-consuming, cutting and pasting line-by-line. It’s a joy to just get that data right onto my invoices now.

This is a first release, though, and still in beta, and while I didn’t have any problems with it, there are some enhancements I’d still like to see.

For each invoice created Freckle provides a link that I can send to my client, or I can easily print a PDF or hard copy. But that means that I still have to go and mail or email my invoices — I guess I’ve been spoiled by my existing service that just takes care of all of that for me automatically.

There is also no way to charge a mixed rate. My company offers different services that often bill at different rates — with Freckle the rate is entered once and applied to every line. An override for specific lines would be great.

Finally, there is no link to Paypal or other payment gateway. Most of my clients pay by check so this isn’t a deal breaker for everyone but there are some who prefer Paypal or credit card and that integration makes it so much easier for them — and I obviously like to make it easy for folks to pay me.

Overall, for the clients and projects that I can fit into its functionality, the addition of invoicing is useful, but I quite can’t get rid of my other invoicing apps just yet.

Invoicing is included with any paid Freckle account plan.

How do you manage your time tracking and invoicing?

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Qlockwork is an Outlook plug-in that automatically tracks the time you spend working on your PC and records your activities in a calendar. It tracks the time spent in all applications (not just Outlook), and can generate reports showing how your time was spent across a number of different projects, which has the potential to make filing out invoices and timesheets a breeze.

The first three readers to comment on this post will get a free license.

You don’t need to work hard to figure out the simple interface, either. A calendar sits on the left side of the screen that lets you go back and review any day, week, month or selected timeframe to see how you spend your time. Categories appear below the calendar. The rest of the interface splits into two sections: Active Time and Away Time. That’s it.

Chrometa's Main Screen

Initially, all activities appear under “Uncategorized.” You can leave it like that, if you’d like. Or you can create new categories by project, client or others. If you want an application to always appear under an assigned category, Chrometa can do that. For example, you could tag Hootsuite and Tweetdeck so those entries always go into the “social media” category, or tag Thunderbird and Outlook  entries for the “email” category (note that if you use a web-based email app like Gmail, this won’t work unless you use a unique browser for Gmail only). Chrometa not only shows how much time you spend in email, but also it gives you an idea of what emails you worked on based on the subject of the email. Web browser activities work similarly, relying on the web site’s title.

Sometimes it’s hard to identify an activity. That’s not Chrometa’s fault. For example, say you start a new Word document that you have not yet saved. Unsaved documents show up in Chrometa as “Document1,” Word’s default name for an unnamed document. Confusing web site items are also out of Chrometa’s control. Furthermore, you can’t edit Active Time descriptions. This is both a good and bad thing. It’s good because clients who need to see where you spend your time know that they can trust the information. It’s bad because not everyone needs to share data with others.

Chrometa runs minimized, sitting in your system tray out of your way. When you step away, you don’t need to do anything to track your non-PC time. Chrometa knows you’re idle when you stop using the computer for a set time. Upon your return, an alert box appears so you can enter how you want to record the non-PC time or ignore it. This is the only time the app pops up without your involvement.

You can easily block applications that you don’t want to track. Additionally, we all visit web pages or look at an email for a few seconds. This can add up to a lot of activities, but you can hide activities that are shorter than one minute, five minutes and 10 minutes. Like blocked applications, this cuts the noise and concentrates on the real activities.

Other features include the ability to export data to an Excel spreadsheet, and Timestamps for showing a chronological record of your daily activities in one-hour blocks.

Chrometa's Timestamps Screen

You may pause the app when you use the computer for activities not related to work that you don’t want to record. But be warned that it won’t remind you that you’ve paused the time in case you forget to turn it back on. A future release will need to address this.

The program has only a couple of niggles. The Active Time data sometimes disappears, and the only way to get it back is to close and open the application. The app could also stand some usability improvements to make it easier to change categories, or to move things around. However, the time management application is ahead of many others in its ease of use and effectiveness. The impressive thing about Chrometa is that you can benefit from the collected data without doing anything.

You can download Chrometa for free. The free version has all of the features of the paid version, and works for 30 days. After 30 days, you’ll need a license key to continue using the app either by purchasing Chrometa for a one-time fee of $99 or qualifying for a free license.

What do you think of Chrometa?

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Although I like feeling organized, I don’t want to spend ages learning how to use software, and one thing that really frustrates me is unintuitive systems with poor usability. Generally, I think the simpler things are, the better. So I was excited to hear about 1DayLater, a new time-, cash- and distance-tracking service that is nothing if not straightforward.

For me to put the words “excited” and “tracking service” in the same sentence is a big deal. I decided not to get my hopes up. But using the service lived up to expectations: 1DayLater seems to be just what I needed.

The Basics

1DayLater is a free web-based service (additional premium features will be added as the service moves out of beta). Create an account, and you can use the clear interface to enter the “values” associated with the activities that you do: money, time and distance. You associate that value with a client and a date. Simple. If you like, you can add notes to that entry; my entries identify what tasks I completed for each client. There’s also a auto-timer that you can use to track your work in real time. Very handy.

From this point, users currently have a couple of options. The first is “Analysis.” The system can provide you with charts that reflect, for example, the time data you’ve entered, providing a graphical overview of where all your time’s going. This should provide some very interesting (or is that alarming?) information once I’ve been using the system for a while.

The second is “Export,” which lets you download data in OpenOffice spreadsheet format. You can select to download data about a certain client, “value” type — time, expenses, income, mileage — or on the basis of search criteria that you define.

The 1DayLater team is, of course, working on additional features which will include invoicing and mileage claims; these features are likely to form part of the paid component of the 1DayLater service. The Export facility was released as I was reviewing the service, so hopefully these extra features won’t be too far away.

Equally important is mobile access to the service. Those on the go will undoubtedly be disappointed that there are currently no mobile or desktop apps for this service. While this may seem like a big oversight, the 1DayLater blog explains that the team is now working to develop these (not surprisingly often-requested) apps.

Who’s it For?

The brothers who developed this service, Paul and David King, describe their inspiration for the service:

At the start of 2008 we were working separately as freelancers and realised that there was a problem common to both of us — we found it hard to keep track of how much time we were spending on our clients, and that this problem was reflected in our invoices.

As someone who’s in exactly the same place, I find the service is just what I want; a lot of the other software and services I looked at were too complex and detailed for my simple needs. I didn’t need to share my data with anyone else, except maybe an accountant — so what some would perceive as the limits of the 1DayLater service are great news to me.

OK, so the service doesn’t sync with my calendar; most of my time is unscheduled, so this isn’t a feature I need. OK, so it’s a one-person-per-account system; there’s only one of me, so I don’t need to aggregate my data with others (though if I did, I could probably do it manually through the spreadsheet export).

I do think, though, that the present lack of mobile and desktop apps is a limitation that would reduce the convenience of this service for a large portion of web workers — fortunately, not for long!

See For Yourself

You can view the demo for 1DayLater without signing up, but registration is free, so you might as well go ahead and see what the service does for you.

Have you tried 1Daylater? What other time, cash, or expense tracking services can you recommend?

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The trick with time tracking is arriving upon a degree of detail that’s both useful and efficient. It doesn’t help you if keeping track of things is all you end up doing because it’s such a time and attention-intensive process. Conversely, a general account of “Peformed project-related work” for a time block of eight hours isn’t particularly illuminating, either for the client or yourself. So how granular should your time tracking and reporting be?

I worked with one company that insisted on providing time reporting for all project staff in 15-minute increments to all of its clients. It might seem impossible, and in practice, it was, though that didn’t change the wording of the guidelines. What ended up happening was that either the client would demand simpler reporting, or company assets on assignment would “go native” and refuse to submit such ridiculously extensive accounting of their time.

Over time, the most sensible way of going about time tracking for the company became apparent. Generally speaking, project staff would report changes in activity throughout the day in blocks of time of no less than half an hour, and no more than three. Then before passing on said info to the client, administrative staff would edit it, depending on the needs and wants of the particular client stakeholder receiving the report.

As a web worker working on a contract basis from home, your process should be similar. The easy part is knowing to what degree of detail you need for your own purposes of professional development: experience will tell you that. Determining what a client wants is trickier, but should follow a similar logic. Arrive at a standard first through trial and error with some early projects, and then use that as the template for all future engagements. Solicit and pay attention to client feedback after that to determine what’s right for the person you’re currently working with.

As with most things, the best way to go about it is to avoid extremes. Report too much or too little, and you’re likely to either over- or underwhelm a client. The perfect balance is hard to achieve, but a good balance shouldn’t be too hard to arrive at.

How do you determine how granular to make your time tracking?

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Where many time tracking tools expect you to export reports and then break out information about specific projects or clients, Yast lets you share your tracking information on a project-by-project basis. That simple difference is actually quite important: I can track the time I spend on one client’s project and send off that information, without showing the amount of time I’ve spent on my own projects and without having to do any copying, pasting or deleting of information. All I need to do is share that project with my client.

Beyond the ability to share information, Yast has a simple interface that allows you to switch between projects just by clicking. It is a web-based application, which may make it less useful for some users, but the interface is very visual. You can quickly tell what project you’re currently tracking, along with other details, just by glancing at it. The timer itself is organized along a timeline that gives perspective about how much time you’re really devoting to a project. You can zoom in and out on the timeline to see information at different scales. You can also label specific types of projects with different colors, drag and drop them into different folders and keep everything organized.

Exporting reports on your time use is a matter of selecting the period that you want to look at and choosing a format. Yast offers Excel, PDF and CSV exports, as well as an online preview. You can also generate reports based on specific projects, or all the projects in a folder. The reports don’t really offer much analysis of how you’re spending time, but since you can pull them into Excel, you can probably run any analysis or comparison that you really want to, although you can get a general idea of where your time is going by taking a broad look at the timeline.

Yast is free to use, requiring only a very simple sign up — just provide an email address and a password and you can start tracking time. The site has been in beta for about a month, which is long enough for the team behind Yast to have already rolled out both performance upgrades and new features, like the addition of exporting to Excel and CSV files. The creators are still creating new features, and are currently working on synchronizing Yast with Google Calendar.

Have you tried Yast for time tracking? How did it work out for you?

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I decided to take this a step further — what if I made a real effort to note down what I did every minute of my life? What if I recorded all the food I ate, the water I drank, exercises I did, and even my happiness? Not such an impossible feat, given that in this Web 2.0 world there’s an app for everything. So I decided to track my life for at least a week to see how feasible it was to do.

Gathering Tools for Life Tracking

Tracking every aspect of one’s life sounds like a daunting task, so I needed to automate as much of it as possible. I started with ManicTime, a downloadable app that tracks computer usage. Among the stats it gathers are the applications you use and the web sites you visit. You can also tag your timeline to better identify what you were doing at any given time. My tags included “digital fiddling,” “email,” “online reading,” “freelance writing work,” “design work,” and “personal writing.”

While ManicTime is tied to computer usage, I also used it to tag the time I spent away from the computer including “sleep,” “eating,” “chores” and “offline reading.” I simply tracked my offline time via pen and paper and tagged it in ManicTime at the end of the day. This was a handy way for me to compile all my time information in one place, as well as take advantage of ManicTime’s statistical features.

Remembering a previous post by Dawn Foster, I also signed up for DailyBurn to track my nutritional intake as well as my exercise. Its food database was quite extensive, so I rarely had to input nutritional information manually.

Next came the most difficult part: tracking my mood. After a bit of research, I found some specific methods over at Kevin Kelly’s Quantified Self blog. The only disadvantage of the proposed methods was that they were too specific. I wanted something simpler and more automated, so I signed up for Track Your Happiness instead.

Findings and Results

By just the second day of my experiment, I was already learning something. To my surprise, I spend most of my waking hours writing, whether paid (freelance work) or unpaid (personal projects). This came as a surprise because most days I feel like I don’t really do anything, so it’s comforting to know that I spend that much time focused on nothing else but putting one word after another.

Here are some other non-work stats, gathered throughout the entire experiment (daily averages):

• Digital fiddling — 0.54 hours
• Sleep — 7.67 hours
• Family time — 2.67 hours
• Time spent tracking and analyzing these things — 1.10 hours

I was also glad to discover that I always drank more than nine glasses of water per day. My average calorie count wass within the norm (1638 Calories), but I had the tendency to go over my carbohydrate limits per day.

As for my mood, it appears that I’m a generally happy person — except when I talk to children or work on things I neither want nor have to do. The big surprise, I suppose, is that I’m happiest when I’m planning my business.

Tracking Your Life: Should You Do It?

Here’s the thing I have to admit: except for getting my happiness report, I didn’t finish the experiment. I only lasted until the fifth day, and by then, doing all this tracking was taking its toll on me. I saw that as I tried to keep up with jotting down every fleeting moment, I was getting more stressed. Sure, it only took me roughly an hour a day to track and analyze data, but that’s an hour of my life I’d rather spend on something else.

Quantifying your time, nutrition, and mood can be a learning experience — but you need to know your limits. If tracking your life lessens your enjoyment of it, then either change your approach or only track what’s necessary.

What aspects of your life or work do you keep track of? How do you keep track of them?

Image by karen_d from flickr

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Time entry in LogMyTask is done via a Twitter-like interface. You can view time data through a fully featured calendar view, making it easy to see what you — and your co-workers — have been spending your time on. Here’s a screencast showing it in action:

LogMyTask is free for up to two teams, each with two users. Larger teams are free for now, but after the beta finishes, it will cost 99 cents per month for each additional user.

Have you signed up for the LogMyTask beta? Let us know what you think of the service in the comments.

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The longer I continue this practice, the more I’m coming to appreciate it. Here’s why it pays to track.

#1: It helps with finding the “time sucks.”

You might realize after tracking your time for a while that certain types of projects are less profitable than others. For instance, if you’re a ghostwriter, you might make considerably more writing blog entries than in-depth white papers. If so, you can adjust your pricing or service offerings to compensate.

You might also find that a particular client is more demanding of your time than others, and as a result, you might decide to drop him, charge him more going forward, or change your work habits in order to be more efficient.

#2: It helps with staying on track.

I currently have a very specific goal to keep me on track — work four paid hours per day. I can quickly glance at my time sheet for a given day and see if I’m anywhere near that goal. If I’m not, I know I need to concentrate on acquiring new projects. The more consistent you can be about hitting your own daily goal, the more consistent your income and work load will be.

#3: It helps with being more realistic.

As I mentioned, my goal is four paid hours of work per day. I realized recently that reaching my much lofty income goal would take much more time. In reality, lead generation, administrative tasks, and communications make it impossible to focus exclusively on paid work, so I had to adjust my income goal to match my available time.

Also, you might estimate that you’re working much more or less than you really are. Having a detailed time log shows just how much you’re actually devoting to your business. If you left the corporate world in order to have more flexibility and free time, but you’re still putting in 70-hour weeks, then your reality is well out of line with your intentions, and you might want to rethink your workload.

#4: It helps with improving profitability.

The more you can arm yourself with information, the more accurate you can be when making projections, like giving clients quotes and estimating expenses, which in turn leads to increased profitability.

You can also learn a lot about what tasks are taking more than their fair share of your attention. You might have a “busy” month (one filled with things to do, communications, etc.) and not really have a “profitable” month, since much of your time was unpaid. Hopefully, you can then identify low-value unpaid tasks going forward, and weed them out of your to-do list.

So, although time tracking might seem like yet another demand on your already overtaxed schedule, give it a try for a few months and see if it doesn’t improve your business, and your bottom line.

How do you streamline the time-tracking process? Share your tips, as well as the ways time-tracking is helping your business.

Image by flickr user RBerteig

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The price is unbeatable for lone freelancers and business owners, with a $0 price tag. If you work with a team that will need access to the software, it’ll cost 30 euros ($40) per user per month, with the first user free. Should the out-of-the-box package not have everything you need, Severa has add-ons available for a fee.

Severa succeeds in standing out from the field with one-click access to common features. The Dashboard (in the screenshot below) has a clean layout with good color contrast to help with quick scanning.

All of the fields, pages and drop-down menus are customizable so you can remove those you don’t need or add more options. Severa does a nice job of ensuring its forms display key information and limit the number of required fields.

You can search your data with keywords and limit searches to just one part of the application. Advanced search has a long list of columns to use as filters for searching. The right-hand side of the app holds a calendar and quick help box that changes based on where you point your mouse.

Viewing an account displays all of its contacts, cases and invoices. Like the rest of the app’s pages, the “Case” page avoids presenting too many fields. Cases come with a useful “Internal” tab for non-billable or internal work so you can track non-revenue producing activities. However, adding tasks to a case feels crude, as you can see in the next screenshot. It’s easy to make a mistake by not getting the format right. Those tasks are important when it comes to doing time sheets. The tasks will show up as an item so you can enter the time worked. This ties in with the invoice, which will reflect the time worked and the rate.

As an example, I created a new account called “WebWorkerDaily” (client) with Mr. Simon Mackie as the primary contact. I used this assignment in creating a new case from within the WebWorkerDaily account and referred to it as “Severa Project.” Adding the tasks came next, followed by entering my time for the assignment. So far, so good.

However, I hit a roadblock with the “Invoicing” and “Fees” sections. It took some experimenting before Severa finally spit out the invoice with the right information as it appears in the next screenshot. Once over the hump, I breezed through the application.

Severa has a sleek interface that lets you dive right in. It has a couple of minor obstacles, but so do most applications in this space. The CRM will suit those looking for a well-integrated and even-keeled solution, without feature overkill — it also sports LinkedIn, Facebook and Google Maps integration. Having CRM, project management and invoicing all in one app will make a lot of sense to many web workers.

The Finnish company’s software supports English (both U.S. and UK varieties) and Finnish.

What do you think of Severa’s CRM, project management, time tracking and invoicing solution?

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Last month, Aelgo launched the latest revision of its Manhour time-tracking application for Mac users.

WWD regularly covers time tracking, accounting and billing applications, but Manhour’s new release and its specific support for OS X users makes it a good time to cast our critical eye over this product.

Some of the highlights from Manhour’s latest 1.3 release include:

• Support for varying hourly rates that might apply for different times of day or activities, for example.
• Automated time-tracking and fee calculation, based on the fee structure you’ve defined. Users can even choose to bill down to the second, which could get interesting when coupled with a premium-rate phone support option!
• Integration with the OS X address book, to allow tasks and projects to be directly linked to clients’ contact cards.
• Comprehensive and editable reporting of recorded tasks and time blocks, also exportable as CSV, PDF and plain text.

Manhour does nothing that you wouldn’t expect from such an application, but its integration with core OS X features such as the Address Book and Menu Bar, coupled with a low price of $10 and a 15-day trial period, seems like pretty good value.

Personally, I shy away from working at hourly rates, but I have to admit, I might just give Manhour a whirl for a couple of weeks to track how much time I’m actually spending on work that I generally only bill in half- or full-day increments. Certainly most web workers could benefit from “metering” actual time vs. billed time.

Find out more at Aelgo’s Manhour product site.

What do you use for time tracking?

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Overview

Timewerks creates invoices and tracks billable hours and materials used on a per-project basis. You begin by creating projects. The application contains five primary screens: Projects, Invoices, Clients, Work Items and More. The features in More include Data Export, Help and Invoice Color, while the Clients section integrates with your phone’s Contacts so you don’t have to enter contact information twice.

Using the Timer

In my test, at first I thought that the timer had a bug. As you’d expect, you tap Start and Stop to manage the timer as you work on a task. After stopping the timer, you can associate the hours with a work item. The problem I had was that the work items I added when setting up my projects didn’t show up as an option right away. Eventually, the items did appear in the list of tasks — but it’s not clear what made that happen.

The Project Summary screen provides a clean overview of the project, complete with time spent, billed and unbilled items and direct access to that project’s invoices.

Create and Customize Your Invoices

You can invoice by hourly rate or by item and create items for expenses and materials. To include your company’s information on invoices, go to Settings on the iPod Touch or iPhone and look for the green Timewerks icon. The only customization option available (through Invoice Colors) is the background color of the invoice. I’d recommend leaving it as the default white, as the limited color choices don’t really improve the invoice’s look. For example, here’s a wheat-colored invoice.

When you create the invoice, you can add the tax rate, if applicable, and email it to your client. If you need to accept credit card payments, Timewerks integrates with Inner Fence’s Credit Card Terminal. The credit card application is a separate product, but at least you have a way to accept credit card payments as part of the invoicing package.

Export Your Data

Data Export gives you the ability to export Timewerks data to use in another app. You can access the exported Comma Separated Value (CSV), or a Tab Separated Value (TSV) files from any web browser connected to the same network as your phone through an address provided by Timewerks. It took me a little fiddling to get this feature to work. The app provided http://localhost.local:8000 in my test, which didn’t work. I had to use the following steps to get my local IP address:

1. Go to Settings on your iPhone or iPod Touch.
2. Tap Wi-Fi.
3. Tap > next to your network, under Choose a Network.
4. Copy the info next to IP Address, typically something like 192.168.1.1.

To get your data, open your web browser and enter the IP address plus port 8080, for example: http://192.168.1.1:8080/ (include the backslash).

The exported data can be imported into a spreadsheet or another billing app, as many accept CSV and TSV files.

Sorth, the company behind Timewerks, provides documentation and screenshots so you can get a detailed feel for the app before deciding if it’s right for you.

If you love portable solutions, you’ll dig Timewerks. It’s available at the iPhone App Store for $4.99.

What business apps do you prefer to use on your cell phone or handheld device instead of on a computer?

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Based on the number of time tracking applications we’ve covered here on WebWorkerDaily, and the frequency with which new ones are being introduced, it’s obviously an area that’s in high demand.

Even among the team here we all seem to be on our own missions to find the perfect time tracking solution. Dawn recently wrote about her experience with Harvest and I’ve certainly tried my share of apps over the last few years. But after a couple of months of trialing, testing and tweaking, I’m ready to commit to freckle.

I had the opportunity to talk in depth with Amy Hoy, lead designer of freckle, about what it is and isn’t. It is designed to be simple, easy to use and unobtrusive. It was developed to address what they saw as problematic with the time tracking solutions that they were using.

It isn’t for teams requiring time sheet approval, org chart hierarchies, assignments or permissions.

freckle acknowledges that while time tracking is a necessary task, it isn’t our real work, but rather an interruption of it. The thought is that if it were easy and painless to use, we would be more diligent about our time entries.

With freckle it’s all about the syntax. Once you learn it you can log time amazingly quickly.

The time entry form can be accessed from any screen on the app. It’s just three boxes: time, client or project, task and/or tag and then done. With careful naming, and by taking advantage of the auto-completion functionality, you can do this in just a few keystrokes.

Any new project or customer data I enter here is created for me on the fly. There is no need to go in and create a client, create a project, create a task for a client, and then log the time. In one step I can create, log and tag everything I need. I can always go in and add more detail later when it fits my schedule.

Not only is time tracking critical for billing, but I am also realizing that I need to keep better track of where the rest of my hours are going. A simple asterisk after a tag flags an item as non-billable and the reports make it obvious to distinguish between the two.

A nicely designed “Pulse” page gives a good overview of time logged by day and by project. You can hover over the pie charts for more details.

Like time entry, reports can also be run from any page. You can narrow down your data by project or tag, and then download your results as a CSV file for use in your invoicing application.

Sometimes it’s the little things that make me smile when using an application, and freckle is full of these surprises. For example, as easy as it is to log time, I do sometimes need to go in and add things at a later date. If I start to enter in my time information and realize that I’m on the wrong date, it doesn’t erase what I’ve entered when I choose another tab to make the correction. A little thing but a nice surprise.

Time rounding increments can be set on a per-project basis to reflect the different billing arrangements you might have with individual clients.

Once I had settled on a tagging structure which worked for me, freckle just feels “right” to use. I wish there were more integration options but an API is currently in beta so they should be forthcoming. It is already possible to log time along with code commits with the Beanstalk Hosted Subversion service.

As of now there isn’t a widget or any other means to log time externally to the application, but as I always have a browser open that hasn’t been a barrier to my adoption. I did suggest the ability to log time via Twitter like I can do with tasks using Toodledo. The quick-fire syntax would suit that well.

My big issue with freckle is the cost. For a single user on the $12 per month solo plan I am limited to ten active projects, which just isn’t enough for me. All other plans feature unlimited projects as well as increased users and SSL connection but upgrading to the next tier runs to $24 per month.

Perhaps accurate time tracking will help me recover that difference, but as part of the suite of applications that I use to run my business, an updated Freckle plan would be the costliest. I am finding that with clever use of projects and tags I can make the cheaper plan work, but it is less than ideal.

There is a free one user/one project plan to use to check things out, and all of the plans offer a 30-day free trial.

How are you tracking your time? Would freckle be a good option for you and your team?

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