How do you keep time?

[JohnDG52]

I generally work to "round days", and apportion hours at the end of the week. eg if I go shopping on a particular day, I knock a couple of hours off. If multiple jobs are on, I try to only concentrate on one a day, otherwise apportion hours approximately. Keep track of the mess on Excel. No complaints in the last 25 years.

[Alex Dresko]

Manic Time (www.manictime.com)

[Dan Neely]

Most of the time I just mentally note when I started for the day, how long I took for lunch and use that to figure out when I should stop. I normally only work on one project at a time, so everything goes to that one except for occasional exceptions (that I generally enter on the time sheet immediately to make sure I don't forget them). When working on two projects at once I try to split my time by days or before/after lunch to keep things simple. My current job's 15 minute intervals isn't quite as good as my last ones 30m ones at filtering out all the various small random items that come up into the rounds to zero category but it works most of the time.

Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, weighing all things in the balance of reason? Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful? --Zachris Topelius

[Kent K]

Toggl[^] This is a fairly low effort and accurate way to do what you seek. You set up clients and projects linked to them, then start the timer and work away. Any time you get interrupted it's easy to stop the timer and start another and easy to choose the projects you are working on too when doing so. It remembers the most common latest tasks (your typed description of what you are doing) and autofills it after typing a couple keystrokes. From experience with it over many years, this really sounds like a good solution to what you are looking for in terms of accuracy/integrity based on your comments to other's replies. I use the free version.

[honey the codewitch]

It would be except timers make me feel pressured and so they interfere with my ability to work at my most effective capacity. That's why I use a clock. I wasn't so much looking for a solution as I was satisfying curiosity, but of course if I do see something I could work with I'm open to trying it. :)

There's smoke in my iris But I painted a sunny day on the insides of my eyelids So I'm ready now (What you ready for?) I'm ready for life in this city And my wings have grown almost enough to lift me

[WPerkins]

I keep a little 4x6 pad and jot down times. Later in the day transfer those notes to a simple database. (I am a programmer, right? UI in C#, database is SQLServer lite, did it myself years ago.) I tried going all automated/commerial/iPhone app but found that simple jotted note on paper was much quicker and less interrupting overall. Since I need to take care of admin stuff (email and what not) anyway the few minutes overhead of entering the hand notes into the database is inconsequential.

[klinkenbecker]

I gave up long ago. I either give a client a price for a particular tranche of work and that's the price I get or I guestimate the hours at the end of the day (starting at 8am, no interrupts and finishing at 4pm is 8 hrs). After the fact, I re-calibrate price for the next tranche. Sometimes I win, sometimes I loose, but it makes for a much lower stress day - trick is to balance out in front. Alternative is contract or employment - but then you get paid for your day regardless and everything you touch is theirs. In my experience, consulting IT/Devops can charge a lot of money for solving problems but consulting coders never get rich coding unless you are building a popular product. If you are never going to get rich, why not just enjoy your day and work interesting projects with great clients who trust what you do and how you do it. If a client doesn't like your process, then they are not worthy of your time.

[Robert Cummings 2021]

I am on salary, so I only do it for myself. I started tracking time to help me learn how to estimate. I tried excel sheets, but that was a royal pia. I found Clockify https://app.clockify.me I just open it in a browser and enter what I am going to work on, and just have to go back and enter the next task. If you forget, you can adjust the time. You create and remove your own projects. Has a simple, but effective reporting. It is nice to run the report on Fri afternoon, so I can tell the boss how I spent their time that week. I use the free version, not sure what the paid version offers. The free version does have something about billable/non billable. But again I am not sure what that does. cheers

[Arthur Humphrey]

A lifetime ago I used Javelin. It was a spreadsheet that had an inherent understanding of date and time. A simple script let me select a project task then start, stop and pause a timer. At the end of the billing cycle for a client I ran another script that generated an invoice. This barely scratched the surface of what Javelin could do but it worked well for me. Some time during the early 80's my drive ate one of the 5.25 inch floppies and I was not able to find a replacement. I switched to using recipe cards. That was okay except for the transcription needed at the end of the billing cycle.

[ormonds]

I don't do it by computer - except to create and print a table showing the day broken down into hours with space alongside to write down what I am working on. I keep this alongside me. If I miss filling it out during the day (normal) I find it more accurate to fill it in at the end of the day than to guess at the end of the week. This requires, of course, a table of job identifiers - in my case job numbers and names.