Track Your Time on Each of Your Projects as Easily as Operating a VCR
Here's a problem I hear about all the time: It's too difficult to accurately track time. I have experienced this firsthand, in fact, both as a freelancer trying to bill clients on an hourly basis and in corporate life, trying to assess how much time gets devoted to each of the many projects vying for my time. That problem just gets worse when we try to track and manage resources -- like how much time employees have to get their projects accomplished.
Over the years, I've tried a number of time tracking tools, but they're invariably too complicated and get abandoned soon after the trial begins. Today, though, I have a simple time tracker that just might be the ideal solution.
Ticks is a free time tracking tool that lives in the Windows System Tray. The program sports an unlimited number of projects or clients, and there's no complicated interface to configure and manage everything. Just click the icon to see a pop up window in which you can add projects, rename them, set the rate and billing increment. You can easily start and stop the timer for each project individually, or for all the projects at once.
The program is so simple that I can't imagine an easier or less painful way to track your time; if you've ever wanted to encourage team members to track their time for a resourcing study, this could be the low-impact tool to do it.
Unfortunately, Tick isn't perfect. The data is stored in a text file in your Documents folder in the form of a log rather than a form that would be importable into a spreadsheet like Excel. And you can't specify a different filename or location for the log -- so you can't have it saved automatically to a network share. Nonetheless, the simplicity of Ticks makes it a great option.
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